The Lit Landscape (Part 2)

I'm a fan of the hidden nook. While at Cebu Marine Resort at Cordova, where I made this picture of Mangrove saplings, with the family, I found a patch of more mature trees that enclosed a strip of sand at the end of the concrete pier. I peered in and  saw an opportunity to squeeze in an off-camera flash into the scene below.

I changed my camera settings to underexpose the scene by about two stops. I lowered myself a bit more to get a better angle.  I planned to light the tree trunk on camera left, so I changed my position to juxtapose the yellow leaves on upper camera left with the trunk. It was a matter of asking my assistant, the lovely Susan, to move into position with the flash, which had a 1/4 CTO gel on and a grid to warm up and restrict the light coming off it respectively. I shot a couple of frames and varied the shutter speed to control ambient contribution until I got a mix that I was happy with.

I could have shot the manicured lawns and the ornamented interiors of the resort, but I'm sure that most of their camera-carrying clientele have already snapped a picture or twenty of these sights. I am a fan of the concealed cranny because I believe there is beauty to be found and revealed where it is not immediately apparent.

The Lit Landscape (Part 1)

For a portrait guy, I sure have been shooting a lot of landscapes lately. Truth be told, I am working on a number of personal projects that involve portraiture, but these are just in the planning stages for now. I have resigned myself to doing more deliberate and thought-out shoots to generate pictures to add to my portfolio, since I don't have as much time and energy as I would like. As a consequence, I also get to do fewer sittings, so I grab any opportunity to use my camera in between.

On the same day that I shot the picture I talked about in a previous post, I found a patch of Mangroves by the concrete pier that I was standing on. I stared at them for quite some time, watching them sway about in the wind. A light must have gone on in my head because the next thing I know I was grabbing a hot shoe flash from my bag. After which the following thought process ensued ---

Shoot it in under ambient (midday) light.
Blah.

Okay, let's switch WB to tungsten.
Much better. I like how it makes the water a surreal sort of blue.

Let's light this sucker!
At ISO 200 and f/11 your flash contribution isn't registering in the image.

Power on full! We can live with the seconds-long recycle.
Okay, the flash contribution is showing, but it's lighting the stalks and it's a bit distracting.

Let's get the wife Susan to dangle the flash over the water. Maybe ask her to hold it close to parallel to the ground so it just skims off the leaves.
Nice. Great idea on skimming it off the leaves.
Hey, thanks. You helped too.

And if you're wondering why I talk to myself, those who know me well will assure you that as long as I keep the internal conversations with myself to myself, I'll be fine.

Oh yeah, the picture.

Watching the World Go By

Fortress of Solitude

Saving Stories

Great pictures tell great stories. The picture above is unremarkable at best, but I believe that the story behind it deserves telling. Some moments do not simply lend themselves to repetition and they become lost in memory after they pass.

This was shot on a gusty, blustery Sunday afternoon that would see typhoon Gener ravage the northern part of the archipelago while still making its presence felt everywhere else in the country. The people in the image are harvesting shells, the kind that's usually boiled (often with vegetables) to make soup. They scoured the entire length of the beachfront for hours, wading in thigh-deep waters in that inclement weather. However, it wasn't until I passed some of them on my way home that I noticed that the plastic gallons that they used as containers were barely a third of the way full.

And it was at this moment that I decided to give this image its best chance to recount the story of these shell harvesters because I truly believe that awareness can be a powerful thing. I don't normally ask as much of an image in post as I have this particular picture, but my original capture was rather flat and undramatic. By post-processing purposefully, I pushed it to its limits to extract every detail in the tale that I begged it to narrate.

This is not a great picture, not by any stretch, and I would not normally share it, but it is an image that gave me both pause and perspective. And sometimes you have to save the picture, so it can tell its story.

Using Custom WB as a Creative Tool

Red to Blue

In as much as it is a necessary task when shooting in RAW, I have no stamina for prolonged post-processing (PP) work. I would rather be out there making pictures rather than sitting in front of a computer monitor. I do most (lately, it seems to be all) of my PP work in Lightroom, which works for me since I mainly just make adjustments to the sliders under the 'Basic' and 'Detail' panels for the pictures that I shoot. And for this very reason, I always strive to get the shot right, as I have previsualized it, before I even press the shutter. If I can't make it in camera, then I won't fake it in post.

This brings me to an article I read on setting and using a custom white balance (WB) to create an interesting scene from an otherwise ordinary location. I didn't really fiddle with the WB setting on my camera until about two years ago when I wanted to get more consistent color temperatures when working with flash, and even then I mainly just used the preset modes. If you need a primer on WB, I recommend you read this simple and easy-to-understand article on the subject.

I wanted to test the principle of the technique, so I opted to do the reverse of what's shown in the article that I linked to above. I also wanted to find out if it would work on non-human subjects, so I choose to shoot my wife's potted plants.

Okay, on with the experiment! It starts with setting the camera's WB to 'Daylight', and then shooting the scene with a red gel in front of the lens.

I wonder if I can pass this off as an abstract art piece. I mean this guy certainly pulled it off. But I digress. I shot the concrete wall above the plants since it was as close to a neutral gray as I could get. I then used the file to set my WB to a custom value, after which I set my WB setting to 'Custom'.

So, did it work?

Watching the World Go By

Unburdened

Something Good Can Happen After 3 am

There is a short window of time, right after the moon sets and just before the preglow of sunrise begins to show over the horizon, when the sky reveals its more oft-missed wonders to me --- the stars.

Under the right conditions and with a lot of luck, I can usually make out a lot more of them than one usually sees in the city, given that I'm viewing them through a sickly mixture of halogen and fluorescent lights. Watching the sky in all its glittering glory takes me back to sleepless summer nights when I was a teenager, when my friends and I would go to the beach and wait for the sun to come up. We would sit on the sand, listen to the waves lap up the shore, and just talk for hours on end. Good times.

And although I am a fan of daybreak, there is just something about a starry sky that holds me in awe and makes me feel a little more hopeful that the coming day is just going to be all right. At an age where mornings are viewed with so much disdain and dread, I believe I may just have found my own slice of heaven.

1 out of 259

Poet Rita Dove once said, "Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful." I am fortunate to have a twofold insight into that wonderful passage --- First, as a chemist, I have experienced firsthand how a substance can be refined via the effervescent purification of the distillation process. Second, as the occasional 'poet', I can appreciate how choosing the right words for the right occasion can make one's message far greater than the sum of its parts.

These words resonate in photography as well. I believe now (and it took me a while to get to this point) that if you want to make a great picture, you just don't need to get the technical aspect right, but you have to consider the creative elements of the image (and more so). Your picture must tell a story. And very often this story is achieved by choosing what part of the image to show in the frame. And even when you feel that you have a lot of good pictures that meet the criteria, not all of them will be great. Trust me, they're not. (Quite often, you have to be your own worst critic.)

I read an article for photographers who want to improve their skill; the piece was written by a professional who said that if you get ten good pictures in a year, then you can consider that to be a good year. So, in as much as I would like to 'say more' by putting out more pictures, I chose the picture below out of 259 (culled from nearly 400 images) to tell my story of last Saturday's department party*.

Do you think I was able to tell my story of the events that transpired well enough?

Please feel free to throw in your two cents in the 'comment well' below. Thanks for reading.

*Other pictures from the event will still be posted for the purposes of documentation. :-)#

Watching the World Go By

Busy-ness

Before Sunrise

I have chased many a sunrise in the past (and I still do). One time, Carlo and I were literally driving like mad just to shoot one before harsh morning light reared its ugly head. Whether you are a photographer or not, witnessing the break of day is awe-inspiring. The only catch is you have to be there pretty early to capture it.

I have mistimed shooting a sunrise many times before. In the tropics, the whole event can be over in under a minute or two. Yeah, it's that quick. If you're just setting up your  tripod, then you'll miss it. If you're still fiddling with your camera settings, then you'll miss it. If you take the time to tell the photographer next to you how wonderful it is, then you'll miss it. With these lessons learned, I make it a point to be at my pre-scouted location (usually selected a day before or earlier even) at least 30 minutes before the sun is scheduled to bathe the world in golden light.

*Thanks to the lovely Susan Locaylocay for shooting this picture.

Okay, so now what do you do while you wait?

Shoot the scene before the sun comes up.

You'll often be surprised with what you get. As I have mentioned in previous posts, the camera and the human eye don't perceive the world the same way, so what may look muted and dark to you may look entirely different to the camera. Plus, you can always manipulate your shooting settings to render the scene in front of you in a different way.

  

 Yeah, it pays to show up early. :-)#