Black and White Photography (my attempt)

Earlier in the semester, I did a blog post about doing black and white photography. I linked an article I read about how it can bring a new perspective to something, eliminate distractions, bring out detail, and create a more powerful image. I mentioned how I wanted to create some black and white shots. So, that's exactly what I did. Below are two examples of it.

This photo I took at Timberline lake early in the semester is an example of a photo where I believe that black and white made it more powerful and striking than it was in color. It lets the viewer focus more on the detail of the rock and clouds.

In this photo, the main reason I made it black and white was that there was a very distracting red/orange reflection on the water. Bringing it to black and white eliminated that distraction bringing the point of focus back to the duck. This also fits well with the minimalist photography which I discussed in another blog post.

Share 2 and Critique 3

1/50, F/22, ISO 200

 1/250, f/ll, ISO 200

The Power of Adobe Lightroom

When you go out for a photoshoot, especially when you are an amateur like myself, it can be difficult to get your picture to look as you intended. This can be because of a number of factors such as aspect ratio, white balance, exposure, color, composition, etc. Luckily, for us in this modern age, where we have digital cameras with flash memory, these problems that make for a less than desirable photo can be fixed relatively easily and conveniently. This is because of a program called Adobe Lightroom Classic. Below I will compare the final edited images from the previous share two and critique compared to their original, completely unedited form.

 As you can see in the second image, I was able to use the lightroom crop tool to remove distracting elements from the frame. I was also able to bring out more detail in the bridge and some of the background trees. Third, I made some adjustments to the basic settings to really bring out the red in the bridge as well as the warm evening colors/lighting.

In this photo, I used the crop tool a lot to get rid of much of the distracting background and foreground and really make the subject the obvious center of focus. I used the saturation and vibrancy tools to bring out the colors. Finally, I used the brush tool to help brighten up the duck and further display it's colors. The editing really improved the quality of this picture by bringing focus to the subject, and bring color to the originally bland picture.

If you end up with photos you don like after a shoot, hope of ending up with something good is not lost. If you know how to properly use it and have a bit of patience, you can use lightroom to make it into something you can be proud of. I believe the photos above prove that point.

Share 2 and Critique #2

1/250 sec, f/4.5, ISO 200

1/40 sec, f/11, ISO 200

High Speed Photography

 The high-speed photography style is an interesting artistic choice to me. It can produce very striking images that capture the viewers' attention because it is something that cannot be seen by the human eye. While a lot of the time it is not applied to landscape and nature photography, it definitely can, with things such as capturing a hummingbird's wings in detail while they are in motion, or capturing images of waves crashing on rocks with all the individual water droplets in detail. Below I have linked an article that explains how to do this photography. You would think you could only capture high-speed images with a special camera capable of extremely fast shutter speeds. This article explains how to capture these high-speed images with most digital cameras that have manual settings.

Like I said before, he talks about how really any digital camera with manual settings would work just fine for high-speed photography as well as any lens is fine as well. The only other equipment requirements are a tripod and a flash. He discusses doing this type of photography in a dark room. What he does is set the camera to bulb mode and uses the flash to expose the shot at the right moment and also uses a narrow aperture. He says to use the flash at the lowest power setting so it is as short as possible. This can produce amazing shots that will be very striking because it is not something you can normally see.