Seeking Your Own Vision

I apologize to you who follow this blog for not posting last week. There simply was not time. Running our workshops is intensive, as we want to give as much time to our participants as possible. As you might imagine, our days are long. We get up to take advantage of the gorgeous pre-dawn light as well as sunrise. After several hours of imaging back at our base, we head out again to enjoy the late-afternoon light, sunset, and again, that magical light that happens after sunset.

One of the things that is interesting in our workshops, is watching the changes in approach in our students. We try to show them that there is usually more to a scene than what first meets the eye. We want them to seek their own vision.

For those of you who have been following this blog, I wrote an article about Selecting a Photo Workshop in which I described one workshop we ran into where people spilled out of a couple of vans and set their tripods up right next to each other, all facing in the same direction. Hardly seeking your own vision!

We were proud of our students and the vision they found. We pushed them to do shots other than the pretty-postcard ones, to try to treat an oft-photographed scene in a different way, pointing out different possibilities.

And instead of standing eye level to the tripod, we encourage different vantage points. After all, a different viewpoint will catch the viewer's eye more than the standard, eye-level shot.

Even when two people are photographing essentially the same scene, their vantage points may be different.

And the interpretation of the scene may be quite different, to wit these ones from a different location by two different participants...

Or two from another location...

Part of each person's vision includes how he/she envisions an image processed. These three student treatments of the same scene, for example, are totally different...

Sometimes, in seeking one's own vision, one finds subjects that are not the obvious ones for the location...

This last shot, by the way, comes with a bit of a story. We were up at Delicate Arch, waiting for the light to get better. I had been encouraging the participants who had joined me to get down for a different view. Finally, one lowered his tripod, adjusted his position, and asked if I would mind moving to the left a tad.

"Or course, not," I said, followed quickly by, "Can you wait a minute? There's a raven heading straight toward me."

The raven in question landed about four feet away from me, obviously accustomed to people. I have a habit of talking to the animals. Just call me Eliza! I quorked at my new friend, and he quorked back. We did this for a while, and he was charming, lowering his head repeatedly and puffing out his ruff. I started making that knocking sound they do. He repeated, and we conversed back and forth for a good twenty minutes, much to the amusement of the crowd lining the ridge. Bit by bit, he inched closer to me, so he was finally a mere two feet from my feet. I kept hoping that wouldn't decide that my painted toe nails were worthy of inspection.

The raven got increasingly more insistent, until one kind-hearted soul tossed a piece of apple to him. He stayed with us for a good three-quarter of an hour and finally flew away.

Arnie and I actually got to photograph a little. Here is one of my different views, my vision.

So, when you go out photographing, think about what you want out of your image. How do you want to treat it? Is it going to be a color one or black and white? See it in your mind's eye. Seek your own vision.

Road Trip, Different Viewpoints

In our workshops, we always say that each person brings a different view to a scene. If you have ten photographers interpreting a certain scene, you are more than likely going to get ten different views.

This happens with Arnie and me. I would hazard a guess that with the majority of couples, if one is a photographer, the other is not. If that is in fact true, Arnie and I are unusual. Two photographers, married, living together, and working together. And, we're still talking!

"For better, for worse, happily for lunch … but separate offices," is our motto!

Our work has changed since we melded our photography businesses. When we first joined forces well over ten years ago, my mother, a New England landscape painter who lived next door at the time, would point to a photograph and say, “Now, that’s Arnie’s,” or “I can tell that this one is yours.”

I remember the first time she looked at our shots from a just-completed assignment and pointed to one as being mine.

“Actually,” I said, “That one is Arnie’s.”

She looked surprised, but undaunted, selected one that was clearly Arnie’s.

“Uh, actually that’s mine.”

Arnie, having started out with LIFE and other editorial origins, traditionally shoots the broad view, while I usually seek the more intimate, close-up one. Now, however, we sometimes find that for a scene that I would traditionally shoot close-up, I’ll use a wider lens; at the same time, Arnie also reverses his usual mode of shooting and selects a zoom lens. It is interesting and not surprising. Artists working so closely together cannot help but influence each other and serve as inspiration for one another.

We always find it interesting to review each other’s images. Sometimes when one of us cannot make anything out of a potential scene, the other one will, such as this one of some interesting rocks:

As those of you know who follow this blog, we’re on a long, three-week road trip. The first leg took us from North Carolina to Boise, Idaho, with a detour down to part of Flaming Gorge in Wyoming and Utah. We didn’t have a lot of time to shoot because of our schedule. 1,100 miles the first day, another 800 the next, and 700 the third day. With both of us driving and getting a really early start in the morning, we can do this.

We did stop a couple of times the second day in Nebraska, as we were both attracted to the russet and golden colors of the fading corn stalks in contrast with the lush green of soy plants. We kept looking for the right scene where we could safely stop. Finally we found it.

“Stop!” I said.

“I can’t,” said Arnie, “We have a truck behind us.”

There was a place to turn around shortly, though, and we quickly returned to the spot.

The textures were wonderful, and each of us found something different to photograph from basically the same spot:

The corn rows, we treated in completely different ways. What's more, this was a case where Arnie and I reversed our usual modes of composition:

Our third day on the road, I really wanted to show Arnie Flaming Gorge. He had never seen it before, and it is one of my special places for photographing.

The first stop was in the reservoir area. We crossed a feeder river, and before we knew it, the car did a 180, and back we went. Both of us saw the same scene, but since Arnie got out first, he grabbed "my" spot, so I did the classic thing; I turned around. Here are our two scenes:

On the map, I saw a road that I thought might produce a shot or two, so we turned in. We both found a lot of photographs in this area, including the one used to illustrate where one person can sometimes find something that the other cannot. We both saw this tree. I lay down on the ground, gingerly avoiding the Prickly Pear cactus under the tree, while Arnie framed it with the rocks:

After stopping here, we headed down into the gorge area. The deep canyon walls in red contrasted with the green of the — what else — Green River. Again, we treated the essentially-same scene quite differently:

So, when you come to a workshop or go out shooting with a buddy or buddies, share your photographs. See what others did. It doesn't mean that you copy them, but we each have different eyes and can take inspiration from others.

We are next headed to Moab, Utah, for our Arches & Moab workshop. The next blog may be devoted to the scouting process. One never knows where my fingers will take me on the keyboard!

Upcoming workshops: Arches & Moab (UT); New England Fall Foliage (NH & VT); and Lighthouses of the Outer Banks (NC). For more information, go to our Barefoot Contessa Photo Adventures website. We also have spring listings, so check those out, too.

If you wish to get notices when new articles are posted, look below this article and click on/in the appropriate box. Even if you choose not to do that, please share this with your friends and relatives who love photography.

Comments from you are always welcome. Many people write us privately, but it's fun for others to see the comments here. You don’t need to be a Google member to do so. Just click on the “comments” link below and post anonymously.

HDR Can Be a Great Tool

While I have seen HDR (High Dynamic Range) tools used with restraint, enhancing a photograph rather than overpowering it, I have seen it used more often to give everything the same value. Those of you who have taken our workshops know what I mean. Values are the lights, darks, and midtones that make any piece of artwork interesting. In fact, in photography, the dynamic range is a term used to express the ratio between the maximum and minimum black-and-white measurable light intensities. Whew! In other words, a photograph with a broad range of values represented has a high dynamic range; a high-key (very light) photograph, on the other hand, has a low dynamic range.

The new DSLR cameras give you somewhere around 7-8 f/stops of dynamic range, better than some of the old films, but still not as much as the human eye can discern. We see details in the highlights and shadows that the camera cannot quite capture. The great advantage of using HDR (High Dynamic Range) tools is to increase that dynamic range to somewhere closer to 10-11 f/stops.

We teach techniques in our workshops to lead the viewers' eyes into the image, not out of it. The danger in our minds is that too heavy a hand can put all the values on the same plane, thus confusing the eye. Where should one look, if there are no values to lead one into the photograph? Where is the drama? Remember, the eye goes to where the lightest light meets the darkest dark. If there are no real lights and no real darks, and if it is light on the edge of the frame where it may meet a dark background, that is not necessarily a good thing compositionally. Different people look for different effects, to be sure, but as photographers, rather than photo illustrators, it is something to keep in mind. I happen to be a photographer and not a photo illustrator, so I come at HDR with that bias.

As with any new technology in Photoshop, I did some experimenting for different effects that did not venture beyond the pale. I actually bought Photomatix that gets excellent reviews. Some reviewers have written, and I tend to agree, that some of the local contrast is lost in Photoshop CS3. Photomatix's tone mapping seems to prevent this from happening.

My very first HDR image was one of a Maine lighthouse. It is a place I have photographed often over the years, and a place to which I always return. How to give it that Sunday punch? It is a very white building against usually a very clear, blue sky, unless, of course, it's cloudy. It was late-afternoon sunny when I did my shots this spring with HDR in mind.

I have found that one does not always have to do seven or nine shots to come up with the input necessary to produce a good HDR image. This one was done with just three, seen below, with the middle one being the "correct" exposure. You'll notice that the shadows are in a different place in each of the images.

I ran the three through the Photomatix tone-mapping mill, did a couple of tweaks, then in the final image did a little bit of burning to make sure the edge wasn't too bright. This was the result...

It captures that late-afternoon look that I really like and brings out the detail in the window; yet, it stays within the bounds of photography rather than photo illustration.

The next one I did with one of Arnie's photographs. There was a stormy sky that had lots of detail, but when photographed, one had to expose for either the sky or the rocks. I suggested to Arnie that five exposures might work just fine. They follow, so you can see the challenges presented by the dark darks and the light lights. When the exposure works for the rocks, the sky is blown out; conversely, when the exposure is right to bring out detail in the sky, the rocks go black.

Again, using the tone mapping feature of Photomatix, I tweaked it a bit and ran the HDR. In the final image, because the trees were too light along the edge of the frame so that they drew our eyes out there, I did some vignetting through burning to achieve the effect we wanted...

As you can see, the sky gained a lot of drama, while the red of the rocks came through. Click here for a larger version of this and the lighthouse above.

One of my more recent images was from our August trip to Arizona. I got up really early one morning to hike part way up a local mountain. Because of the steep climb and the near-record temperatures, I didn't relish the idea of lugging up my tripod. I hadn't brought my monopod because of airline restrictions, so I decided to give my worn knees a break.

In stitching and in HDR, it really is much better if you use a tripod, but when I decided to hike up, I didn't even think of that with daytime temperatures close to 110 degrees. Once I reached the saddle of the mountain, however, I saw not only stitching possibilities, but HDR ones as well. There was a beautiful panorama, and the sun was producing what I call "ZOT light." I am sure you've seen it. Those rays of light that go ZOT down on the landscape. The Hudson River School painters were famous for using it.

The combination of the two elements was irresistible, so sans tripod, I decided to try it anyway. I've always been pretty steady, and I had nothing to lose.

I found a good spot where I could brace myself, yet rotate. I did a series of three exposures each of nine overlapping shots. One of the series is shown below.

I then took each exposure set and made a panorama, so that I ended up with three panoramas in three different exposures.

Then, because I didn't have my tripod, I had to go through a few more steps so that my new panoramas would work in Photomatix.

I have come up with a basic set of inputs that seem to work for me, so I ran the three new images through Photomatix with a tweak or two. Experimenting further, I decided to try the default setting which appears below the one processed with my settings. Larger versions may seen by clicking here.

Now you can see what I mean about HDR sometimes evening out the values so the photograph is not very interesting. The top one of these two, processed with "my" Photomatix settings, brings out the darks and lights. The bottom one above shows all the detail in the foreground and evens out the clouds so there is no drama. You'll notice that the top one actually gave some added definition to the clouds and ZOT light as compared to the lower one done with the default settings.

Now, compare the original, "correct" exposure to the HDR version:

Comments from you are always welcome. Many people write us privately, but it's fun for others to see the comments here. You don’t need to be a Google member to do so. Just click on the “comments” link below and post anonymously.

For those who missed it last week, we have uploaded a video with lots of photographs from Arnie, John, and me to our YouTube site called "People Portraits."

Remaining fall workshops: Arches & Moab (UT); New England Fall Foliage (NH & VT); and Lighthouses of the Outer Banks (NC). For more information, go to our Barefoot Contessa Photo Adventures website.

New spring workshop: April in Savannah (GA).

If you wish to get notices when new articles are posted, there are two ways to do it. See both options below, Subscribe to BCPA's Blog and Follow BCPA's Blog. Even if you choose not to do that, please share this with your friends and relatives who love photography.