Category: Miscellaneous

Taming Lightroom’s Local Adjustment Tools

Lightroom has several local adjustment tools you can use to work on specific areas in your images, including the Adjustment Brush and the Graduated filter. Both have been criticized for been somewhat blunt instruments: lacking the precision of carefully masked adjustment layers in Photoshop. While it’s true that Photoshop offers the possibility of creating very precise local adjustments, it’s unfair to unduly criticize Lightroom’s local adjustment tools: they are more capable than some would have you believe.

You might choose the Graduated filter to darken an overly bright sky. The problem though is that unless you are working with an ocean or prairie scene, with a perfectly flat unobstructed horizon, chances are your Graduated filter adjustment will end up darkening a portion of your landscape as well. Despite the fact that it was a very dark overcast day in Vik, on the south coast of Iceland, the sky was still very much brighter than the landscape below.

To retain that dark stormy look I applied a Graduated filter in Lightroom, adjusting the Exposure down and the Contrast slider up. This recovered the dark and stormy look I was after, but also unnaturally darkened the headland beyond the town.

This is an easy fix. Remembering that the Shadows slider affects mainly the darker tones and not the mid-tones and highlights, I simply moved the Shadows slider up until the headlands returned to a more natural look.

The local adjustment brush is enormously powerful. It is also maddeningly difficult to use if like me, you were one of those kids who always found hard to “colour within the lines” in elementary school. Instead of driving yourself crazy, just do the best you can. If the area you are brushing over is relatively even toned, turn on the auto-mask feature. This option senses the tone of the area you first click on with the brush tool and tries to avoid applying your adjustment when the brush crosses over into the area with very different tonality. However, there is a problem with auto-mask when you are brushing over an area with a lot of texture: auto-mask will interpret the texture as many different small areas of different tonality: some needing your brush adjustment, others not. You end up with a mottled effect which is likely not what you were after. It’s often easier in these situations to turn off auto-mask, and just do the best you can with the brush, then turn on the erase option and erase back up to the line. If the area you are erasing is relatively even toned, turn on the auto-mask feature and the erase tool will do an almost perfect job of erasing up to the line, but no further. I had been working on the image below, and while I was generally satisfied, I wanted to really make the Chateau, the primary focal point in the image. It was still competing with the enormous visual weight of the rock face on the Dordogne River near Roque-Gageac in France. Remembering that our human eye-brain visual systems are naturally drawn to warmly lit objects over those illuminated by cool light, and to those with higher contrast and saturation over those with lower contrast and saturation, I decided to add a local brush adjustment to just the Chateau, increasing the white balance (too warm the chateau up a bit), and to increase the contrast and sharpness subtly as well.

My problem, as has always been the case, was that I found it very hard to produce an evenly brushed result that remained with the roof line of the turrets. So I simply did the best I could and switching to the eraser tool, easily erased back to the outline of the Turret.

The result of the brushed adjustment is subtle, but allows the Chateau to command the viewer’s attention almost before anything else in the image

If you’re curious, here is the original image, straight out of the camera

Now, you might say the edited image is not an accurate portrayal of the original scene, and you would be correct. The final image is however an accurate representation of what I felt that morning by the river bank, watching the sun periodically move in and out behind the clouds and fog hanging in the valley. It would from time to time illuminate first the Chateau, then a line of trees along a ridge, and then perhaps a spot on the river bank. The local adjustment tools in Lightroom allowed me to create the effect of sunlight falling on different areas of the image all a single frame. No Photoshop required.

The Northern Lights or Aurora Borealis is an awesome sight to behold. If you live in the northern reaches of the globe, or even if you are in areas as far south as the northern tier of US states or anywhere in Canada or northern Europe, chances are good that the Aurora will visible to you at some time this winter.

The Aurora is caused by electrically charged particles emanating from the sun (often referred to as “Solar Wind”) colliding with atoms the earth’s upper atmosphere. These collisions cause the upper atmosphere to glow, creating shimmering sheets and whorls of colour. Because the earth’s magnetic field tends to concentrate these collisions toward the poles, the Aurora is most often visible in higher latitudes. The strength of the Solar Wind, and the Aurora that results from it is tied to the 11 year cycle of sunspot activity, and 2014 is very close to a peak.

Photographing the Aurora is actually pretty easy, predicting it is by far the hardest part. Several web-sites can provide some help. If you live in Europe, www.aurora-service.eu is about as up to date as you can get. In Canada, www.aurorawatch.ca , and in the US: auroraforecast.gi.alaska.edu and spaceweather.com can provide some guidance and information on current conditions.

The best time is often between Midnight and 3am, so be prepared to be down on your sleep a bit. It is important to wait until the sun is sufficiently below the horizon so that it no longer has any impact on the night sky. This occurs after “astronomical twilight”, which is reached about two hours after sunset in the northern US states (later in more northern latitudes, and earlier in the more southern latitudes)

In the field you need to find an area with the darkest sky possible. Light pollution from city lights or even a full or partial moon, will significantly diminish the impact and intensity of any aurora that may appear. This isn’t easy if you live in an urban area, but it’s worth thinking about, and taking the trouble to drive in to the country away from city lights.

You may not need to be too far out of town to notice an improvement in the intensity of the aurora colours; the images here were shot within a few miles of downtown Reykjavik, Iceland in mid-September this year.

To photograph the aurora you will need:

• A sturdy tripod, (which should come as no surprise)
• A wide angle lens: as wide as you have, and at least 24mm (full frame equivalent: 16mm for APS-C cameras). Faster is better here, a 24mm f/2.0 or 1.4 would a good choice. A 16-35 f/2.8 zoom is perhaps even better since Aurora tend to fill the entire sky, and a truly wide angle will allow you to capture more of the display.
• A cable release
• Patience

Your lens should be focused at infinity, but do not rely on the infinity marking on your lens barrel. Particularly with zoom lenses, the marked infinity focus point may not coincide with the actual infinity focus point at all focal lengths. To be sure you have are focused on infinity, you need to actually focus on a distant object. This isn’t always easy, given that you are out in the dead of night. Pick a distant city light near the horizon, or pre-focus before it gets dark and tape the lens barrel down to prevent any focus shift. Barring this you can use live view (with the LCD image zoomed all the way in) to focus manually on a single star in the center of your image.

Your exposure meter will be little use to you in these situations, but exposures of 15 to 30 seconds, f/2.8 at ISO 1600 to 3200 will likely all produce usable images. The main issue here is to select a shutter speed that will be short enough to prevent the images of stars appearing as ovals or streaks. As odd as it sounds, an exposure too long for the focal length you are using can result in stars recording as distinct ovals, rather than points. The formula to determine the maximum exposure for a given focal length is to divide 500 by the focal length in millimeters. So for example, using a 16 mm lens on a full frame camera, your maximum shutter speed would be about 30 seconds (500 ÷ 16 = 31). With a 24mm lens this would drop to about 20 seconds. If you are using a reduced frame APS-C camera, then you will need to divide your result again by 1.5. So for example, an 18mm lens on an APS-C camera would result in a maximum shutter speed of 500 ÷ 16 ÷ 1.5 = 21 seconds. This is pretty much the same result for a 24 mm lens on a full frame camera, which makes sense: both lenses have the same field of view on their respective cameras.

In the end, chasing the Aurora depends on doing a bit of research to predict when one might appear. It also depends on a bit of good luck. The results are well worth it.

As a group, wide-angle lenses are seemingly the hardest for beginning photographers to master. Why is that? Well, for two reasons actually, both tied to their wide field of view.

We generally think of “wide-angle” as referring to lenses for full frame cameras of about 35mm or less (about 24mm or less for reduced frame, APS-C sized cameras). As the focal length of these lenses decreases their field of view increases rapidly. The physics of squeezing a larger and larger field of view into a frame of unchanging size causes these lenses to emphasize objects near to the camera, at the expense objects farther away. The classic mistake when using a wide-angle is to photograph those grand distant vistas, which appear so far away that little of any visual interest is created.

The second problem arising from the wide-angles great field of view is that it just too easy to unwittingly allow distracting elements creep in to the edges of our frame. You have to be extra vigilant when composing with your wide-angles by carefully scanning the edges of your images.

So what is the solution? It’s easy really, and helps to solve both problems created by your wide-angle lenses: find and use some foreground interest. Getting close to an interesting object in the foreground adds impact and visual interest. It can also help to create a sense of depth and scale in your compositions. And on top of this, it often helps, but never completely solves the problem of eliminating distracting elements around the edges of your frame.

Let’s look at a few examples

16-35 @ 19mm; 1/60 @ f/14

This image from Montmartre in Paris shows the all the classic wide-angle composition errors: no foreground interest to anchor it, and lots of visual clutter creating distracting elements in the frame. Both errors end up diluting the impact of the image.

So let’s move to the left and get down low with a 16-35 at its widest setting and use the display of art reproductions to provide some foreground interest and lead the viewer’s eye into the frame

16-35 @ 16mm. 1/125 @ f/16

The row of fishing boats in the harbor of Cassis in Southern France provides a natural “leading line” to draw the viewer’s eye into the frame. Cassis is itself a photographic paradise, and not just because of the scenic harbor. It’s also one of the towns we visit on our Provence workshop.

24-105 @ 35mm; 0.6 secs @ f/22

If you have ever been to Venice, you will recognize this view immediately: everyone photographs it. Aside from being one of the quintessential Venetian images, it’s also a natural wide-angle composition. A sense of three-dimensional depth is created by the near-far relationship of the foreground gondolas and the distant cathedral of San Giorgio Maggiore.

16-35mm @ 29mm. 8 seconds @ f/11

Even though they are not the dominant element in this composition, the foreground bushes on the lower right of this twilight image of Positano on Italy’s Amalfi coast provide just enough of a visual anchor to create a sense of three dimensional depth.

24-105 @ 37mm; 1/80 @ f/16

Wide-angles are not limited to landscape images… try using a modest wide-angle of perhaps 35mm (24mm for APS-C reduced frame cameras) to include some of the surrounding environment in your people pictures…. (be careful that distracting elements don’t creep in around the edges!). On the beach in Collioure, in the southern Languedoc region of France, we managed to get the Artist, his art and the subject all in the same frame.

15mm fish-eye; 1/250 @f/9

Sunrise on Haleakala, 10,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean on Maui (this should be on every photographer’s “bucket list”). Including foreground elements becomes increasingly important as your field of view increases, but the results can be even more dramatic! While the curved horizon is eye-catching, the image would lose much of its appeal, with the foreground rocks. So why not try this: put a wide-angle lens (zoom or single focal length) on your camera and leave it there for at least one week of shooting? Force yourself to see with a wide-angle perspective. Work hard to find some foreground interest, and I guarantee your wide-angle compositions will improve dramatically.

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop to look around once in a while you could miss it.”
— Ferris Bueller

Life does seem to move faster and faster with each passing year. The pace just never seems to slow down; deadlines at work, soccer practice and dance lessons for the kids, lawns to cut, and a hundred other tasks that all demand our attention, right now!

So when we finally have the chance to pick up our cameras, we often fail to leave that sense of urgency behind. We see something interesting; find a point of view we like, shoot, perhaps bracketing our exposures a bit, and then move on: “Done that, what’s next?” The problem with this is that we can easily fail to fully explore the visual possibilities in each situation.

When I’m traveling, or just out for a day of shooting around town, one of my favourite approaches is to simply find something interesting; something that might only make an good background. After setting up, I wait for something interesting to happen in front of my background.

On my last trip to Provence, I visited the town of Aix-en-Provence one morning. I was scouting the area ahead of the arrival of my workshop students, so I didn’t allow myself too much time for actual shooting that day. As I walked along, I spotted this interesting storefront. It was late morning and the streets were quite busy, and without a lot of time to work this subject, I simply cranked off a “record shot” and made a mental note to revisit the location earlier in the morning when the shops were just opening up.

When we returned a few days later, I staked out a position across the street with some of the workshop students, and waited. The store had not yet opened, but we could see activity inside as the shopkeeper prepared for the day ahead. While we were waiting I tried a few images of passersby, some using a slow shutter speed: but none of these were really working. However we didn’t have long to wait; shortly after this the shopkeeper appeared and began setting up the display outside her store. Over the next twenty minutes or so we shot dozens of frames, each with slightly different compositions. Some worked, most didn’t: while you are focusing on capturing the peak of action or the “just right” gesture of your subject it is all too easy to miss a distracting bit around the edges of your frame, or to clip of an important element of your composition (this is one of the few situations where a tripod is more of a hindrance than a help). Here is a representative sample, both good and bad.

In only one frame (second from bottom on the right) did all of the compositional elements come together with just the right gesture of the shopkeeper watering the plants in front of her store. All that was left was to take the image into Adobe Lightroom to bring out the best elements of colour: the contrast of warm interior with the blue themed colours of the storefront.

Is passion necessary to create great images? If you are not passionate about your subject, is it possible to create images that others will find interesting, let alone inspiring? To quote Jay Maisel, “If you’re not excited about your images, how can you expect me to be excited about them?” It’s hard to argue against this idea, (and yet commercial photographers are called upon to do this everyday; against deadlines, and within ever shrinking budgets.) So, if you aren’t feeling particularly passionate about shooting on a given day is there any point to picking up your camera at all? Given the basic premise here, you’re only going to create uninspired, boring images, aren’t you? Is there any point to working at photography simply for the sake of working at it?

Some are blessed with an immediate and clearly defined passion for a particular subject. For some, it might be a burning social or environmental issue. For others, it might simply be documenting the growth of their children. For others still, their particular “passion” in image making may not be so apparent. For those in the latter category: exactly how do you go about finding your passion, this so necessary ingredient in creating images with meaning, images that communicate something about your vision and capture the imagination of your viewers?

Freeman Patterson once said, “If you only make photographs when you feel like it, you’ll never improve”.

The inference is that working constantly is an essential part of not just becoming technically proficient, but also in refining your vision. Working constantly, even when feeling uninspired forces you to work through the inevitable periods of creative blockage that we all experience. If you work constantly and thoughtfully, your skills in composing with good visual design and mastery of the mechanical issues of camera handling will become second nature. And they must become second nature in order for you to do proper justice to subject material about which you are truly passionate. This is just Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours of deliberate practice needed to become expert in new field.

Seeing creatively requires practice… it’s often hard work, but through this hard work, creativity can be learned and improved upon. Patterson suggests an exercise in one of his books on developing creativity and vision that involves locking yourself in your bathroom with your camera, a single lens, and your tripod. The object is to create 36 or more different images using good visual design (this exercise is described in one his books from the “pre-digital era”). Try it. Believe me, it’s hard to find 36 unique and creative images in my bathroom, although yours may be different.

I am also reminded of a story I read years ago… not sure if was the old “Modern Photography” or maybe “Photo Techniques”, but the author related a time when he had invited Andre Kertesz to a weekend away in his cabin. He awoke one morning to find Kertesz outside with his camera studying a pile of firewood, moving back and forth, shooting frame after frame, which to the author appeared to be of nothing particularly interesting. When he confronted Kertesz, asking him, “What on earth he could find interesting to shoot in a pile of firewood?”, Kertesz responded that he simply needed to exercise his “visual muscles” every day, “just to stay sharp”.

Truth is I’m only 90% sure it was a story about Kertesz… it was along time ago. But I do clearly recall the content of the story, and it has resonated with me across three decades. Craft is a necessary precursor to creating great work. To become proficient at craft you have to work at it… even when it seems like the muse will not visit that day. In many ways I think the muse, like “luck”, favours the prepared. And being prepared requires hard work and visual exercise everyday. Now, I’m not suggesting that you simply go out and shoot blindly; it’s important to think about visual design and use these principles every time you point a camera at something. It’s not important that the resulting images be portfolio grade, in fact you may end up dumping most of them after a quick review. It doesn’t matter.

And what have you to lose? Time? Money? It costs you nothing incrementally in this digital age… a far cry from the final years of film, where E100SW topped out a $0.56 per frame developed and mounted here in Vancouver. As for time: any moment behind the camera is a moment savoured for me.

Working constantly also helps you to develop and refine your vision. You will find yourself over time drawn to particular types of subject material. Over time you will begin to see a pattern develop in how you approach these subjects. When this happens, you will be experiencing the emergence of your own personal style. In a very real sense, working constantly helps you to find your passion, to produce images that will excite you and in turn, will excite the imagination of your viewers. I’d like to hear your opinion, but for now you will have to excuse me… my camera bag is calling.

Is passion necessary to create great images? If you are not passionate about your subject, is it possible to create images that others will find interesting, let alone inspiring? To quote Jay Maisel, “If you’re not excited about your images, how can you expect me to be excited about them?” It’s hard to argue against this idea, (and yet commercial photographers are called upon to do this everyday; against deadlines, and within ever shrinking budgets.) So, if you aren’t feeling particularly passionate about shooting on a given day is there any point to picking up your camera at all? Given the basic premise here, you’re only going to create uninspired, boring images, aren’t you? Is there any point to working at photography simply for the sake of working at it?

Some are blessed with an immediate and clearly defined passion for a particular subject. For some, it might be a burning social or environmental issue. For others, it might simply be documenting the growth of their children. For others still, their particular “passion” in image making may not be so apparent. For those in the latter category: exactly how do you go about finding your passion, this so necessary ingredient in creating images with meaning, images that communicate something about your vision and capture the imagination of your viewers?

Freeman Patterson once said, “If you only make photographs when you feel like it, you’ll never improve”.

The inference is that working constantly is an essential part of not just becoming technically proficient, but also in refining your vision. Working constantly, even when feeling uninspired forces you to work through the inevitable periods of creative blockage that we all experience. If you work constantly and thoughtfully, your skills in composing with good visual design and mastery of the mechanical issues of camera handling will become second nature. And they must become second nature in order for you to do proper justice to subject material about which you are truly passionate. This is just Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours of deliberate practice needed to become expert in new field.

Seeing creatively requires practice… it’s often hard work, but through this hard work, creativity can be learned and improved upon. Patterson suggests an exercise in one of his books on developing creativity and vision that involves locking yourself in your bathroom with your camera, a single lens, and your tripod. The object is to create 36 or more different images using good visual design (this exercise is described in one his books from the “pre-digital era”). Try it. Believe me, it’s hard to find 36 unique and creative images in my bathroom, although yours may be different.

I am also reminded of a story I read years ago… not sure if was the old “Modern Photography” or maybe “Photo Techniques”, but the author related a time when he had invited Andre Kertesz to a weekend away in his cabin. He awoke one morning to find Kertesz outside with his camera studying a pile of firewood, moving back and forth, shooting frame after frame, which to the author appeared to be of nothing particularly interesting. When he confronted Kertesz, asking him, “What on earth he could find interesting to shoot in a pile of firewood?”, Kertesz responded that he simply needed to exercise his “visual muscles” every day, “just to stay sharp”.

Truth is I’m only 90% sure it was a story about Kertesz… it was along time ago. But I do clearly recall the content of the story, and it has resonated with me across three decades. Craft is a necessary precursor to creating great work. To become proficient at craft you have to work at it… even when it seems like the muse will not visit that day. In many ways I think the muse, like “luck”, favours the prepared. And being prepared requires hard work and visual exercise everyday. Now, I’m not suggesting that you simply go out and shoot blindly; it’s important to think about visual design and use these principles every time you point a camera at something. It’s not important that the resulting images be portfolio grade, in fact you may end up dumping most of them after a quick review. It doesn’t matter.

And what have you to lose? Time? Money? It costs you nothing incrementally in this digital age… a far cry from the final years of film, where E100SW topped out a $0.56 per frame developed and mounted here in Vancouver. As for time: any moment behind the camera is a moment savoured for me.

Working constantly also helps you to develop and refine your vision. You will find yourself over time drawn to particular types of subject material. Over time you will begin to see a pattern develop in how you approach these subjects. When this happens, you will be experiencing the emergence of your own personal style. In a very real sense, working constantly helps you to find your passion, to produce images that will excite you and in turn, will excite the imagination of your viewers. I’d like to hear your opinion, but for now you will have to excuse me… my camera bag is calling.