Sep 28
Painting by wind
In the previous post I claimed that our lakes are too small to create any real wave action to allow smoothing out the water with long exposures. Well, sometimes it pays to challenge the conclusions I jump into without having any real facts at hand, so today I headed to one of my favourite locations (or as I decided after I came back, the favourite location) while the wind was blowing at its best. I was right on the money about the one second shutter speed though, but I was able to go slower by overexposing to the point of blowing out the highlights and trusting Lightroom to recover them for me (which it did).
So, the discovery I made about the waves is that size doesn’t matter. All you need is a long enough shutter speed to smooth out whatever kind of waves are going about. But today’s exercise wasn’t really about the waves though, because I was more interested to see if I could get the reeds – or grass – to blur out. So all I needed was some fixed point (a rock will do nicely) and then a lot of grass. And would you know – it worked! Lesson learned, I only wish I had tried this before.
I mentioned that this place is now my #1 favourite. It’s good for flowers and landscape and works in any kind of weather, and today I found out that if I had the patience and/or inclination, I could even try wildlife photography there. I saw something in the water, it could swim and dive and it wasn’t a bird. Could I be so lucky that it was an otter? Or maybe a beaver. Or maybe it was something smaller, it was too quick to make it out properly. In any case, it didn’t make this place look any worse in my eyes!
Hmm, if the highlights are blown out, is there any “real” way to bring the lost information back..? Me thinks no. But, what a heck, I do that all the time with overexposed pictures
I’m sure the 9 stop ND would’ve helped a lot, makes me wanna get one too..
Yes that’s what we learned, watch out for the histogram extremes because when it’s gone it’s gone for good. But I’ve noticed that it’s not always the case, Lightroom can in fact recover detail where the histogram indicates it’s blown. I think – without having any science at hand to back me up – that it’s because those highlights are not actually blown, but the camera just thinks so. Say for example, you use auto WB (which I do) in the camera. It assigns a warm colour temperature to the picture and the highlights are blown. But then in post-processing you assign a cooler colour temperature and suddenly those highlights are no longer over-exposed. So in reality, there are no blown highlights, it just depends on the WB. I’ve seen it with my pictures often enough to know that I can get a keeper even when those highlights blink in the camera LCD, but it’s a very fine line though and doesn’t work with every kind of picture. The safe course of action is to expose correctly in the first place, of course, but it’s so easy to cheat with digital!
Nice blurs! I like the half sunken log. Try also having the “fixed object” closer in the foreground.
Concerning recovering blown out highlights: Its not so much about WB. RAW files generally contain more information than JPG. The camera shows the preview and histogram according to your in-camera parameter settings. If you like to see something more like the informaton captured in RAW, you can assign one of the user Picture style settings for that. Set the contrast parameter to -3. It’s still a processed histogram on display, but more accurate regarding really blown out highlights in the Raw file. The preview will be looking very dull, so I wouldn’t recomment it as a standard setting. If you always capture RAW files i can be useful though, since any in-camera setting can be altered during conversion (besides ISO of course ;o)).
The preview JPG – of course! I should’ve thought of that, I mean it’s the reason why it’s impossible to judge sharpness in the display.
Thanks for the tip!
I wrote something about this dilemma in my blog, sorry it’s in finnish only (and in nikonian language..), but makes sense even with Canons. The secret is to disable the WB! http://www.raneolsen.net/blog/?p=163
One time earlier a friend of mine sent me one raw file shot with a canon. I was simply amazed of the amount of detail I got out from the so called burnt out highlights. Good for me not going shopping a Canon just based on that – now I know better