One situation universal to all photographers (except maybe the mobile phone snappers) is a questioning glance at the sky asking "Is there enough light?" Even in bad or failing light it may worth pushing the trigger. I recall being fairly sure this lake shot on a cloudy and damp evening wasn't going to come out (Lake MacKenzie on the Routeburn). Since I shoot raw there was enough detail there to do some highlight recovery by processing the raw image twice (at different exposure settings, then blending the images). This resulted in an image that I feel captures the stillness yet moodiness of the scene. If in doubt, click. You never know—you might be pleasantly surprised!
Continue reading 'IOTW: Bad light, good photo'
Tag archive for 'iotw'
Contrails. Do they ruin photos or enhance them? White Edge in the Peak District is close to the flight path for Manchester, so it's usual to see these scratches in the Blue (it's not usual to see the Blue, but don't get me started on English weather). I'm not sure that they're pretty, and there are environmental implications, but they do set me wondering. Wondering about where the people on board have been. Wondering where they are going. Wondering how many weeks until my next holiday... In this image I think the contrails add interest and declare "open skies" in response to the open landscape below.
Continue reading 'IOTW: Scratches in the sky'
Cambodia wasn't the first humid climate where I'd forgotten about the prospect of condensation on the lens. Although condensation itself can be very beautiful, it's not something you ordinarily wish for when capturing that once-in-a-lifetime photo. It can happen when your camera is initially cooler (e.g inside a case that has been kept in an air-conditioned room/ bus) than the warm and humid outside air, such that water condenses out of the air to "fog" your lens. It typically dissipates quickly once the camera has had some time in the outside air, and the only way to counter it is to acclimatize the lens before you intend to use it. That said, condensation need not be a complete disaster. In this shot it gives the temple a surreal look, replicating the "soft focus" appearance you might tease out of a Photoshop filter (or with Vaseline on the lens if you're old-school).
Continue reading 'IOTW: Angkor Wat condensed'
Sometimes a landscape is just so vast that even a wide-angle lens can't do it justice: you need to make a panorama. This one is stitched together in Photoshop from three separate 6 MP images. The shots were taken handheld from the roof of a Landcruiser, using the "overlap by a third" rule I picked up somewhere (I'd have preferred a tripod to make this easier). Knowing that differing exposures can make blending the images tricky, I returned to the same target area on the left and locked focus and exposure before re-composing for the middle and right-hand images.
Continue reading 'IOTW: Wadi Rum panorama'
This pair of images is to illustrate a simple piece of advice we heard from a professional photographer: Don't forget to look behind you.
Continue reading 'IOTW: 180 degree sunset'
What is it with cats and cardboard boxes? Anecdotal evidence suggests it's not just our Bess who has a mysterious fondness for tight cardboard spaces (if over 1600 catbox photos on Flickr are anything to go by). If there's a box to be occupied, she'll choose it over other accommodation options (fur-lined basket, radiator cradle, lap. etc.). In searching Google I learned that even Schrödinger's cat was placed in a box and that boxes make "unglamorous" kitty toys, but find myself no closer to the truth. You know The Question—it's like a splinter in your mind. Is there a relationship between the size of the cat and preferred box size?
Continue reading 'IOTW: Cat-in-the-box'
