It was another overcast and rainy day in Vancouver, and again some clear patches started to appear before sunset. For this shot, I walked over to English Bay, looking west.
Unfortunately, it stayed predominantly overcast, at least in this direction, so there wasn't much sunset colour able to break through. The clear patches did make for some interesting and dramatic contrast in the sky, though, so I set up for this long exposure, thinking it would convert nicely to black and white.
This is a two minute exposure, capturing the motion in the clouds and smoothing out the water in English Bay. I used a three-stop graduated ND filter to balance the sky and the ground, and a 10-stop ND filter to give me the desired shutter speed to pick up the cloud movement.
I'm a British software developer and photographer living in Vancouver, BC. I mainly photograph landscapes, cityscapes, night scenes, and water.
If you're interested in any...
Alexis, this has to be one of my favourite photos ever in your project and on 365. The B+W processing does so much to lift it from merely brilliant to perfect. FAV. If this doesn't get you a whole bunch of Favs I will be demanding a steward's enquiry!
Adding my fav - love that you didn't let the lack of sunset color stop you from getting an amazing shot. Your landscape images are breathtaking and today for the first time I wondered if you do much post processing editing with them? You know your equipment so well it was just a thought.
@seanoneill Thank you very much! (And thanks to everyone else, too!)
@sianipops It depends on a lot on the photo. I shoot in RAW, so some level of 'developing' is always required to get away from the flat, dull look of an unprocessed RAW file. I'll always perform lens corrections (distortion, chromatic aberration, etc.), noise reduction and sharpening to all my shots. For colour shots I'll generally tweak the white balance to a preferred value. After that it depends on the shot, but I usually adjust the contrast, make sure the image fills the histogram (unless there's a good reason for it not to), boost shadows and/or reduce highlights, and sometimes apply graduated corrections (for example, if the sky is brighter on one side or another).
For black and white shots like these, I'll generally do a reasonable amount of localised processing as well, dodging and burning the image to add contrast where I want, balance the image, and make it more dramatic. I'll also usually apply a vignette to the image to darken the edges. This is very much mirroring the work that used to be done in the darkroom for dramatic black and white shots like this, only in the digital realm.
I very rarely do what I would consider 'excessive' editing (replacing a sky with one from another shot, for example!) I will, however, happily remove or correct small items in the image that annoyed me, such as an errant leaf, piece of garbage, or similar. In this shot, I removed a couple of cargo ships on the horizon, which were hanging around waiting to load up in the docks, as I didn't like this human intrusion to a shot that had no obvious evidence of human activities otherwise. Due to the wide angle lens and their distance, they were very small, which made them easy to get rid of.
Hope that helps, let me know if you have any questions!
I was simply blown away by your wonderful shot .... and then got sidetracked by reading your detailed reply to @sianipops - thanks for all the info, Alexis.
Have you replied to anyone in depth about ND filters? I gaze at "three-stop graduated ND filter ... and a 10-stop ND filter " and think ... wtf??? (Just done a quick search and have seen there are a lot of discussions I need to read!)
@kwiksilver I know I've bookmarked some of the discussions. Alexis did a great one on histogram s roughly the same time as a great one on graduated filters. If you don't find them let me know.
Alexis it is always wonderful to ask a question and know not only will you get a response, but it will be one full of information. My editing skills are still limited to iPhoto and Picmonkey - I have LR and that is one of my year 2 goals .
wonderfully impactful in black and white... can i ask what chromatic aberration is? i always check the box in lightroom assuming that i want to fix it, whatever it is... but maybe i should actually know what i am doing? ;p
You won't go far wrong with that technique! Chromatic aberration, often shortened to CA, is one of the most common types of optical defect in a lens. It is caused because the glass in a lens element has a different refractive index depending on the wavelength of light that hits it -- or to put it more simply, the amount that the lens element bends light depends on the colour of the light.
This occurs because the white light in the background is being refracted by the lens imperfectly, causing the red/purple part of the light to hit the sensor in a slightly different location to the green/blue part of the light. Shooting bright skies through trees is an extreme example often used to test the resistance of a given lens to CA, but CA will show up in many other situations where there is a high level of contrast in the image.
CA used to be much more of an issue than it is today, as it's a defect that is virtually uncorrectable in the darkroom using traditional processing techniques. These days, the effects of CA can be quite effectively reversed, so as to shift the colours back to overlay each other. Indeed, today, LR, PS and other such editing software will do an incredible job just by checking that box, whereas a few years ago, you needed to tweak sliders manually to get the optimal correction.
As with most lens defects, three things typically determine to some degree how prone a lens is to CA -- how much it cost, how new a design it is, and whether it's a zoom lens or not. A very expensive, newly-released prime lens will typically show very little CA, a cheap superzoom will often show quite significant CA. CA is corrected by using low dispersion glass in carefully-designed apochromatic element pairs -- this is what acronyms like XLD (extra-low dispersion) and APO (apochromatic) mean, that you sometimes see in those long strings of letters after a lens name. However, this glass is quite expensive, which is why it's not used for all elements, and why more expensive lenses have more of these types of elements.
Hopefully that helps, let me know if you have any questions!
very helpful! tx! i will have to one day try an experiment and compare the results where i've fixed CA and where i haven't... so far, i haven't really noticed much difference by checking CA, but then, i haven't looked very carefully :)
@sianipops It depends on a lot on the photo. I shoot in RAW, so some level of 'developing' is always required to get away from the flat, dull look of an unprocessed RAW file. I'll always perform lens corrections (distortion, chromatic aberration, etc.), noise reduction and sharpening to all my shots. For colour shots I'll generally tweak the white balance to a preferred value. After that it depends on the shot, but I usually adjust the contrast, make sure the image fills the histogram (unless there's a good reason for it not to), boost shadows and/or reduce highlights, and sometimes apply graduated corrections (for example, if the sky is brighter on one side or another).
For black and white shots like these, I'll generally do a reasonable amount of localised processing as well, dodging and burning the image to add contrast where I want, balance the image, and make it more dramatic. I'll also usually apply a vignette to the image to darken the edges. This is very much mirroring the work that used to be done in the darkroom for dramatic black and white shots like this, only in the digital realm.
I very rarely do what I would consider 'excessive' editing (replacing a sky with one from another shot, for example!) I will, however, happily remove or correct small items in the image that annoyed me, such as an errant leaf, piece of garbage, or similar. In this shot, I removed a couple of cargo ships on the horizon, which were hanging around waiting to load up in the docks, as I didn't like this human intrusion to a shot that had no obvious evidence of human activities otherwise. Due to the wide angle lens and their distance, they were very small, which made them easy to get rid of.
Hope that helps, let me know if you have any questions!
Have you replied to anyone in depth about ND filters? I gaze at "three-stop graduated ND filter ... and a 10-stop ND filter " and think ... wtf??? (Just done a quick search and have seen there are a lot of discussions I need to read!)
Alexis it is always wonderful to ask a question and know not only will you get a response, but it will be one full of information. My editing skills are still limited to iPhoto and Picmonkey - I have LR and that is one of my year 2 goals .
You won't go far wrong with that technique! Chromatic aberration, often shortened to CA, is one of the most common types of optical defect in a lens. It is caused because the glass in a lens element has a different refractive index depending on the wavelength of light that hits it -- or to put it more simply, the amount that the lens element bends light depends on the colour of the light.
The same effect is what causes a prism to split white light into the colours of the rainbow. In photography, the effect is to cause coloured fringing, especially in areas of bright light or high contrast, as in the top image in this example:
http://photographylife.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Uncorrected-and-Corrected-CA.jpg
This occurs because the white light in the background is being refracted by the lens imperfectly, causing the red/purple part of the light to hit the sensor in a slightly different location to the green/blue part of the light. Shooting bright skies through trees is an extreme example often used to test the resistance of a given lens to CA, but CA will show up in many other situations where there is a high level of contrast in the image.
CA used to be much more of an issue than it is today, as it's a defect that is virtually uncorrectable in the darkroom using traditional processing techniques. These days, the effects of CA can be quite effectively reversed, so as to shift the colours back to overlay each other. Indeed, today, LR, PS and other such editing software will do an incredible job just by checking that box, whereas a few years ago, you needed to tweak sliders manually to get the optimal correction.
As with most lens defects, three things typically determine to some degree how prone a lens is to CA -- how much it cost, how new a design it is, and whether it's a zoom lens or not. A very expensive, newly-released prime lens will typically show very little CA, a cheap superzoom will often show quite significant CA. CA is corrected by using low dispersion glass in carefully-designed apochromatic element pairs -- this is what acronyms like XLD (extra-low dispersion) and APO (apochromatic) mean, that you sometimes see in those long strings of letters after a lens name. However, this glass is quite expensive, which is why it's not used for all elements, and why more expensive lenses have more of these types of elements.
Hopefully that helps, let me know if you have any questions!