Photo Corners headlinesarchivemikepasini.com
A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.
Friday Slide Show: Spring on Twin Peaks
22 March 2024
When we call Twin Peaks to mind, we imagine a bare, rocky golden hill with 360-degree views. But that's only half the story.
Because sometimes when we hike up the hill from the south, we are entertained by a nursery's variety of plants. And as we walked up on the first day of spring, we were astonished by what we saw.
In fact, we just didn't believe it, making the ascent with our camera in its holster. It was only when we walked back down the hill that we decided we really couldn't pass these blossoms up.
After all, you don't see them year round. Many of them are a special spring treat.
So we took the Nikon D300 with the 18-200mm Nikkor out of its bag and lined up a few flower portraits.
We've mentioned before our subconscious preference for shooting into the sun. It's bonkers but, for some reason, we like the backlighting. And this was that. Walking south, the sun in front of us, lighting up the blooms we had noticed on the way up.
That confuses autoexposure and you can't intelligently correct for that when you're working in bright sun with only an LCD and a histogram for feedback. It's really something you have to postpone dealing with until post production.
And to give yourself any kind of chance in post, you have to shoot Raw to begin with. You need the elbow room on highlights and shadows.
When we looked at the camera data in Lightroom, we were not impressed. But we'd known what we'd seen.
So we took two steps to get back there.
The first was to try Lightroom's Auto command, trained on many Raw edits. It did pretty well darkening shadows and bringing detail back to the highlights. But we found it a bit timid. It lost a little color, for one thing.
The next step was to refine that edit. And we don't just mean nudging the sliders. Where Auto sometimes decreased Exposure, we increased it and then compensated by increasing Highlights. We almost always added Dehaze and then brightened the Shadows.
We also applied the lens profile for that Nikor and did some cropping because working in the field on onsteady ground meant we didn't compose some of these shots as precisely as we might have wanted to.
When we were done, we were back on the hill. And it was the first day of spring again.
