Dull light? Soft light!

I went camping for the full weekend and hardly touched the camera at all, so nothing new and exciting to share. Time for a useful Photoshop tip then.
Most, if not all, images that have been taken in RAW benefit from a boost of the midtone contrast during postprocessing. The files out of the camera are flat and dull, especially those taken under overcast weather conditions such as this recent image of a Little Owl. There are various ways in which a midtone contrast boost can be achieved. The best known method is probably a tweak of the curves in either Lightroom or Photoshop.

There is, however, an even simpeler approach that I personally prefer.
In Photoshop, duplicate your image layer and set the blending mode of the duplicate layer to 'soft light'. If it looks awful, don't worry. Just reduce the opacity of the duplicate layer to somewhere between 10-20% for a moderate result. By switching the layer on and off, you can see the difference. Subtle, but certainly an improvement. As with all layers, you could apply the effect on only part of your image by adding a layer mask and painting with black and white.

Give it a go and see of you like it. If not, just use the plain old curves!

Little Owl; Canon 1D Mark III w. 500/4 IS and 2x; 1/125s at F11 and ISO 200; Beanbag from vehicle

Fields of Gold

This abstract image of a grainfield was a nice sidecatch to a morning spent on roe deer. The spikes looked wonderful, almost like thousands of little flames, against the light of the mid-morning sun. The light had gotten already too harsh for roe deer images, so I decided to take a go at the grainfield. I dialled in a relatively long shutterspeed and rotated the lens in its collar during the exposure. The result reminds me of a cosy fire in the fireplace during winter time.

Grainfield abstract; Canon 1D Mark III w. 500/4 IS and 1.4x; 1/30s at F22 and ISO 100; Gitzo tripod

One other thing: for Wild@work, we are currently doing some market research to find out what (if any) kind of nature imagery people are willing to buy and decorate their house with, and at what price. We would appreciate it very much if you could spend 5 minutes of your precious time to complete this questionnaire (only in Dutch) and help us out.

Thanks!!!

What the Fog!?

One final try with the Roe Deer. It is obvious that the rutting season has about finished. There's hardly any (inter)action to be seen and the roe deer are again quite difficult to stalk and photograph. On this final try, I was lucky to have a very foggy morning. After some frantic searching, this doe appeared on the horizon and was willing to pose for a few seconds in the fog and against the rising sun. I was taking verticals when she decided to run off, so this is the original image, not a crop from a horizontal shot.

Images taken in foggy weather need a different approach in post processing. Normally, you would move the black and white sliders in Levels inwards until they hit the histogram edges. This spreads the tonal values in your image and increases overall contrast. It is also the best way to kill fog... Just move the sliders inwards a little to taste, but not too far or you'll loose the atmosphere that is typical for a foggy morning. Moving the middle slider a bit to the left lightens your image a bit, which might further improve your foggy image.

Roe Deer; Canon 1D Mark III w. 500/4 IS and 1.4x; 1/800s at F5.6 and ISO 400; Gitzo tripod

Light from the Side

Backlighting is often used to create atmospheric photographs in the form of silhouettes or rimlit shots. I have been using it a lot over the last year as well. Lately, I have been trying to expand on the technique and create sidelit conditions. Sidelighting is very helpful if you want to show texture in your subject. Or in my case: if you just want to create a more dramatic image of a common subject.
Metering for sidelighting is not much different from metering for backlighting and frontlighting. Just put the camera in M mode, (spot)meter the brightest part and set your exposure so that the brightest part gets the tonality you want it to have.

The other (darker) parts will then easily fall into place. If you use evaluative metering (or matrix metering), you should underexpose relative to the metering by about a stop for sidelight and about 2 stops for backlight. Otherwise, the meter will try to render the (shaded) subject a medium grey, therewith severely overexposing the background and lighter parts of the subject.

The image above of a roe deer was meant to be a backlit shot. I was hidden in a heathland beneath a large berch tree, looking straight into the sun, when two female roe deer came running towards me at about 3 o'clock. One of them stood still for a split second, allowing me to take this sidelit shot. And as the camera was in M mode, I did not need to compensate the exposure I had set for the expected backlit shot.

Roe Deer; Canon 1D Mark III w. 500/4 IS and 1.4x; 1/250s at F5.6 and ISO 400; Gitzo tripod

Hi-Key or Overexposed?

"Is your image overexposed, call it hi-key...". A phrase that can be regularly found on the internet. I absolutely do not agree, as there is a major difference between the two. The sole fact that a background may be completely white does not make an image overexposed. You'll have to look at the subject: is the subject also washed out, then you can call an image overexposed. Is the subject well exposed, but does the image consist of mainly light and white tones, then you have found yourself a hi-key image.

Hi-key is often the result of specific weather circumstances, mainly lightgrey skies. If you shoot a subject against such a sky (or the reflection of that sky in still water), you'll have to add lots of light to the metered exposure in order not to underexpose the subject. Given the limited dynamic range of the camera sensor, the background (sky or water) will then render a pure white. Nothing wrong with the exposure (in fact, it could not be better!), just a result of the existing circumstances.

The image to the left of a juvenile Moorhen was taken at the Oostvaardersplassen. A long way from home to shoot a Moorhen, but I was there to sell my beloved Tamron 90mm and buy a Sigma 150mm.

Juvenile Moorhen; Canon 1D Mark III w. 500/4 IS and 1.4x; 1/200s at F5.6 and ISO 400; Handheld