Color Shift with ND Filter

At the river • Fuji S5 pro @ ISO100, 1 sec., 70-300mm VR Nikkor @ 112mm, f/16, Hoya Polarizer & ND8 filter

Today I tried the new Hoya ND8 filter that I bought to get long exposure times even when there's a lot of light - together with the polarizer & stopping down to f/16 I was able to get an exposure time of 1 second for the above shot, blurring the water enough to give the feeling of motion (IMHO) - and it was a sunny afternoon... good!

Well, a problem was that the beginning snowmelt washed a lot of mud into the Salzach river, turning its usual nice light green into light brown... well, mud colour. :-) But thats unavoidable.

The other problem was the ND8 filter: it disturbs the colour rendition. I already noticed this phenomenon with my old Cokin filters (and blamed the Cokin plastic filter material because the filters already do look a little bit brown instead of neutral gray), but now it happened with the Hoya filter too now, so I dug a little bit deeper.

Turns out it may be a Fuji sensor related problem: according to a german forum post (from a very knowledgeable person regarding the filters that are used in front of the actual sensors), the Fuji S5 pro does not have as much a strong cyan colored filter as other cameras, thus it lets through more red which the camera normally counters with white balance. And indeed, the auto white balance from the camera differs by 1000K (!) from a shot with the ND8 filter to a shot without the ND8 filter.

Thanks to the camera calibration control in Lightroom I was able to counter this problem quite easily: by shifting the red hue into orange +12 while at the same time reducing the red saturation by -19, and with the shadow tint set to -2 plus a little bit warming with the white balance control the colours are almost the same as from the shot that was taken without the ND8 filter (in the above photo, I have to say now that I overdid the warming a little bit). I then saved the calibration adjustment as a preset and hey presto, I can fix it with two mouseclicks in the future.

Maybe this helps some fellow S5 pro & Lightroom user out there. :-)

Dominance, Part II

After my first post about Dominance (which I actually published before it was finished - instead of saving as draft - d'oh! Perhaps you want to read it again, I updated it later...), here's a nice way to find out which your personal visual preference is. The initial idea comes from Bryan Peterson, I read about it in his book "Learning To See Creatively".

Basically, its about picking a set of something like 80 photos and identifying the dominant element (color, shapes, patterns, etc. etc. as described in my first post about the topic). You're then supposed to make a list to find out which element attracts you the most, and identifying your personal weakness(es) that way just as well - and then go out and work on that weaknesses, of course! :-)

The easy part is transferring this into the digital domain with Lightroom: create a new "parent" keyword "dominance" and then add sub-keywords (the easiest way to do this is directly in the keyword editor: just add a keyword like "lines > dominance" and you're done). Then you can browse the keyword list and immediately see how often you used which keyword -OR- you can create a new auto collection and have it pick the photos by exactly those keywords.

The difficult part is identifying the dominant element(s) in your photos. The visual center of interest in the following photo is the peak of the Beutelkopf on the right, OK... but what is the dominant element of the composition? For me, its "lines", and the jagged lines of the ridge that leads towards the peak, and the lines that form the silhouettes of the mountains in the background. But aren't lines just about everywhere?! And aren't lines about everything? Each shape has a border which is a line, hasn't it?



So I wonder: is it really that important to identify the dominant element in a photo? Especially in landscape and nature photography? I think that it requires a lot of abstraction. Is it worth it? I do think so, yes. For me, it is about two things: first, identifying photo opportunities and second, making a photo opportunity really work by concentrating on whats really there on an abstract level.

And the other problem of course is... you got to be disciplined when adding keywords. I do have a problem with that, I admit it! :-) Identifying my own weaknesses in finding dominant picture elements is a good reason to add more and better keywords to my photos.

Buoy

"Buoy"
December afternoon at the Chiemsee lake.

Dominance

"Tree in backlight (near Bicheln, Tachinger See, Germany)"

One of the key features of a successful photo is dominance. That is if there's one element in the photo that catches the eye more than the others.

But its not so easy... I was fascinated by the tree in the photo above and how the moss on its branches was almost glowing in the backlight... but is the tree actually dominant enough in all that surrounding chaos?

I decided to show the photo even if I'm not sure its working - picture design is my main focus at the moment, I'm reading a lot about it in books to make myself more familiar with the theory while the weather does not permit too much photo practice at the moment. :-)

Now, the question is... what actually can be dominant in an image? I'll try to name a few and add examples. Its impossible to say which is more dominant IMHO because it depends so much on the context (and most likely personal taste, too).

• Colour: red/anything else (red is one of the most attractive colours - that does not mean its the most appealing! - its hard to "compete" with red for other colors). Complementary colours like green & red, blue & yellow, and hue variations thereof.
• Shapes and Lines: jagged/curved - I'm picturing the silhouettes of steep and rocky mountains vs soft and grassy hills here to visualize that idea. Another example: straight/diagonal (diagonal lines often add perspective and depth to a photo).
• Texture and Patterns: smooth/rough, shiny/dull, etc. etc.
  
• Size: big/small - I'm thinking of a close up photo of a mosquito sitting on the arm of someone. Something very small becomes very big that way.
  
• Rhythm, Difference, Conformity: repetition/chaos, difference/conformity - thats hard to describe... I think of my "Tiefe Berge" (Deep Mountains) photo: the ridges repeat, but they are different.
  
• Brightness: light/dark (for example: if the main subject is in the shadow and some other part of the photo is brightely lit it just won't work)
  

Now, these are not my own findings, but rather a summary of what I read in some books, repeated and enhanced, and explained in my own words. I'm primarily writing these articles about composition and picture design for myself (writing something down simply helps to remember it). I find the topic of composition rather complex and difficult to approach. Why? Well, try to name the dominant element(s) in your photos, and you know. :-)

On Nature Photography

I'm reading a very nice old edition of "The Audubon Society guide to Nature Photography", 1990 by Tim Fitzharris (beware, that website loads rather long). The chapter about picture design is introduced with this paragraph:

"Nature photographs are made primarily because the activity is fun. The fact that they also bring enjoyment to others is a fortunate by-product. Most photographers get up before dawn to wade through a swamp or struggle up a mountain because they like what they see - so much that they want to express the experience to others through their pictures. Sometimes it happens that a person acquires a camera and the discipline of photography forces him to look at the world more critically. In the process he encounters a new and intriguing kind of visual experience."

Well, words more true have never been spoken, at least not for me! :-)

The book is available in a very updated 5th edition in the meantime, and together with its "sister" (the guide to Landscape Photography) it is probably the best book on the subject that I've read so far.

Rummage Sales

Rummage Sales, Palma de Mallora, Spain
Posted using Timothy Armes' new "LR2/Blog" plugin for Lightroom. This is a really nice plugin because you can pre-define a posting template right in the plugin - I use it to directly create a post with the Lightbox presentation, add the photo caption as title for the Lightbox and in small font below the image. You have access to all metadata and can use it in the post.

Antennaria (cityscape)

I think it happens to everyone now and then - some sight stirs up something inside us. I was on my way home on an evening in spring last year, and when I saw the silhouette of the house against the evening sky I went home to get the camera - and made this photo:



My first thought was "people live in there". I think its still pretty unclear what the pulsed electromagnetic waves of mobile phones are doing to us, but I wouldn't feel good living under these antennaes...

Self portrait with dog

Blue Pebbles (and camera bags)

Today I explored new terrain in our vicinity - I need new places and sights and if its somewhere I can take the dog with me, all the better. Hohenwart is only a 10 minute drive from Burghausen and there's a (now frozen:-) dirt road called "Alte Poststrasse" that leads into a small nature reservation area near the river Alz. Its a very nice and quiet area (no major road nearby) and I'm always interested in taking photos with water - I love the motion and the possibilities to play with reflections (or reduce them with a polarizer, making it possible to see things the human eye can't see), etc. etc.


"Snowy track"

The area itself is also a floodplain for the river with the typical vegetation found around the rivers here everywhere. Once scenery especially caught my eye:


"Blue Pebbles"

I increased the saturation in the above photo a lot to turn the pebbles really blue - they were already in the shadows (thats where the blue tint comes from) and the very shallow water of the river reflected the bright sky. I found this somewhat strange scenery very attractive and tried to enhance the strangeness with the colours. And I have to go there again, equipped with a tripod and a neutral density filter to make a really long exposure and render the water all soft and silky.

I ordered a new camera backpack that allows me to carry around the camera gear with a tripod more comfortably. What was important for me was that the backpack should also serve as a daypack to carry around something to eat, water, vegetables and of course chocolate :-) for shorter hiking trips in the mountains.

I decided to get the Naneu K4L, and I found a lot of "real life" photos in a nice user driven resource on the web: Taschenfreak. Its a website that is only about camera bags! Unfortunately its only german, but if you know the vendor of the bag you're interested in its quite easy to find what you're looking for nevertheless from their index page sorted by vendor. They even list rather funny alternatives like using old army bags from the Deutsche Bundeswehr. :-)