Enriching Foliage Photography

It's not easy being green

Susan and I are rushing around getting ready to head out a trip to Yellowstone, the Tetons, and Columbia River Gorge, so this week's blog will, hopefully, be short. Just a couple of techniques, one in the camera and one during processing, to improve your images of our most abundant natural attraction, foliage. 





If there is one thing that we have in abundance in New England, it is leaves. In the spring, they explode with every imaginable shade of green, and mature during the summer to a lush, swaying umbrella, deflecting the summer heat. Of course the fall provides our all-to fleeting, riotous, celebration of color initially in the trees and then as a luxurious carpet until the winter snows allows us to catch our breath. Leaves contribute a limitless palate of colors and shades to landscape photography, but their brilliance is opposed by one pernicious factor, reflection.










When light reflects off the surface of the leaves the brilliant colors

Unpolarized

become muted and dull. The problem is magnified when moisture coats the foliage after rain or in the morning dew. This is why the color of fall foliage is generally best captured on overcast days, and why normal people look upon photographers as crazy when they curse the "beautiful sunny weather". The muting effects of reflection can't always be illuminated, but there are a couple of techniques that can help control the problem.

You Must Have a Polarizer 

Polarized, Unprocessed

A polarizer is designed to cut through reflection and is the landscape photographer's most essential filter. Direct sunlight reflecting off most surfaces becomes polarized to a specific angle which can be filtered by rotating the polarizing filter to block that angle. The degree to which a polarizer can filter out the
glare is related to the direction of the light, being most effective when it is at 90 degrees to the subject. On the other hand, when the

Polarized Processed

light is coming from behind or in front of the camera, the effect is essentially nonexistent. But when the illumination is in the right direction a polarizer can do a wonderful job cutting through the glare. The filter is great for darkening skies, seeing beyond reflection into the depths of lakes and streams and improving the color saturation of foliage. It is often noted that the ability of a polarizer to block reflection is one of the few filter effects that can not be duplicated by digital editing and it is for that reason that it is considered THE essential filter, but there are Photoshop techniques that can enhance foliage and among these my favorite is the Shadow / Highlight filter.

Shadow / Highlight

The Shadow/Highlight function (H/S) is found in newer versions of

Unpolarized processed with Shadow/Highlight

Photoshop in the "edit menu, under adjustments. It is a remarkable tool for salvaging detail in both bright and dark parts of images, but It is also great for enhancing saturation in brightly illuminated foliage. Unlike a polarizing filter its effect is the same regardless of the direction of the light.  In these situations I concentrate on the Highlight sliders adjusting the Amount to get richer color off the reflecting foliage. I then adjust the Tonal Width

Shadow / Highlight Tool

to limit the effect to the desired range of brightness and the Radius to avoid obvious halos. The effects of this filter could be duplicated with a complicated manipulation in curves, but the ease and control of Highlight / Shadow makes it one of my favorite tools and one of the features that makes upgrading worthwhile if your version of PS doesn't have it. If you already have this in your toolbox, give it a try. The best way to understand the power of H/S is to play. Although it will never be able to do all that a polarizer can do, with a little experience I would guess that, like me, you will think of H/S as a frequent early piece of your editing process, especially when it's not easy being green. 

Now back to packing.  I will try to post some images over the next couple of weeks as our travel allows.

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Who Needs a Tripod?

Hand-Held City Lights, Boston

I Do, but Sometimes I Have to Make Do



Basin Sails

I have been struggling to get out to enjoy and photograph the beautiful New England spring colors. This weekend has been consumed with moving our son Jeremy to New York

City. Two weekends ago we were visiting our daughter in Washington DC and much of the week after that I was tied down in a conference in Boston from dawn to dusk. I love Boston in the spring, but it was frustrating to be watching it from inside the Sonesta Hotel along the Charles River in Cambridge. I got out when I could, mostly in the evenings, and I was blessed with a couple of clear nights to play with city light photography.

 

One secret to good city lights photographs is to get there at twilight. You want to have a little light remaining in the sky. A completely black sky is uninteresting and also renders anything which is not illuminated hopeless dark. The smooth, deep blue sky provides a lovely contrast to the specular lights from the buildings.

The Light Won't Wait
On my way back from dinner one night, I realized that the light was perfect. Just enough color in the sky, with the lights of the Boston skyline shinning through and reflected in the Charles River Basin. The Longfellow Bridge, also known as the Salt and Pepper Bridge for its distinctive towers, stood out in nice relief. Thankfully, I had my camera with me, but I knew that if I ran up to my room for my tripod, the twilight would be gone. I had to make do with sources of stabilization that were at hand and then use all the available camera controls to get the shutter speed down to something that an old guy like me could reasonably hold steady. It is amazing how many control are available on a digital camera to optimize low light, hand-held images. On this night I needed all of them:


Making Do
I started by looking for something for external stabilization, and found a part of the railing that nestled the camera nicely.  If it wasn't so blustery and cold, and the rail wasn't so dirty I would have balled up my jacket to provide a "bean bag" effect to further damp vibrations. Nestled on the railing and using image stabilization, I decided that I could steady the camera for sharp exposures of no longer than about 0.5 seconds, preferably less.

Thankfully my 5D Mark II can do a reasonable job at higher ISOs, so I cranked it up to 3200. I didn't need crazy depth of field to keep the boats and skyline sharp. f 4.5 worked well and with that I achieved my 0.3 second shutter with reasonable detail in the darker regions.

Of course I didn't have my cable release and I knew that the shake

from pressing the shutter would be impossible to control. The solution was to set a 2 second shutter delay giving me time to steady the camera with both hands.

I held my breath and shot. It was important to take many images with the same setting, since, despite my best efforts, most of the pictures were still blurry, but a few were acceptably sharp.

Enjoying Mistakes
I got what I came for, but as I looked at the other failed images, I

Jittery 5 Second Exposure

discovered some were actually interesting. I especially liked the one that was probably my worst early attempt at stabilization. This one proved to me what I already knew. There is no way to hand stabilize for a 5 second exposure. The squiggles reflect my poor technique and the coffee I had after dinner. This is almost diagnostic of a three cup indulgence, but I swear I only had one. Regardless of the process I really like the festive, Christmasy appearance. So I decided to try a few on purpose.

Zoom 0.8 Seconds

I concentrated on trying to do zooms. The trick was to allow a longer exposure and to start zooming the lens before I hit the shutter. Here again, the lack of a tripod was a issue, but, in these free flowing images, the lack of precision was not much of an problem. 







I finished with a few more straight images pulling back to include
the railing and walk-way. Here I braced the camera into the side of a tree. Again, many failures and a few not so bad. I even caught one with a woman walking on the path. Happily, her movement created a ghost-like effect that blurred the lovely, but suspicious look on her face.

Ghost Walk, Charles River Basin

I would have loved to have had more time to capture Boston in bloom, but as always the challenged was to make the best of any situation. In a way it can be more fun to make do and the results can be even more rewarding.

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