Photography

Smoke and Mirrors

Category: Mood

  • Rose Coloured Glasses

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    Winter Light

    Ontario evening sky colours are different from the dazzling displays on the prairies. If colour were music, we would be talking Brahms and Beethoven respectively.

    The Ontario colours are softer with shades of pink that blend subtly with the orange sherbet colours closer to the sun. This photo was taken in high quality JPG format on the way to the convenience store with the Fuji F10, a little point-and-shoot that continues to amaze me with the way it handles low light.

    In Photoshop, it was opened in the ProPhoto RGB colour space in order to avoid clipping the warmer colours and adjusted in Curves. This is my favorite colour space for processing everything, especially photos with yellows, reds, and oranges. These are the first colours to be clipped in smaller spaces. Then it was cropped with perspective to straighten the streetlight and horizon. Sharpening was done lightly with the High Pass filter.  Image was converted for web colour space and resized. It’s not a spectacular shot but rather an everyday memory. It captures a brief moment when the world was filtered through a rose-colored sunset.

    Writer’s note: Have you noticed that it is the warmer color that tends to be clipped in images? The same holds true for words. We often tend to censor our passion, allowing some to leak on to the page, but not in its true state. Explore both the vibrant western sky and the rose and orange sherbet sunsets of the central east. Each has value. Each describes a state of being that is breathtaking and neither deserves clipping.

    Fujifilm Finepix F10

  • Gull Harbor at Dusk

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    Evening Light

    When the deep purple falls
    over sleepy garden walls, 
    and the stars begin 
    to twinkle in the sky—
    in the mist of a memory 
    you wander back to me,
    breathing my name with a sigh.
    Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi RAW ISO 100 95mm f/4.5 -0.4s

    The old song suits the island. It’s a magical place.

    What is the one thing that we need for a successful shoot at dusk on a summer night in even the most magical places?

    Bug repellent! You can hardly tell there were a million mosquitoes biting like mad when this was shot but the light made it all worthwhile.

    The photo was taken at Gull Harbour on Hecla Island, Manitoba, Canada. I set up a tripod on the bank and waited for just the right moment. This was taken at the changing of the guard, when the sun sets and the moon rises. The sky had a very pronounced purple cast that deepened quickly.

    Writer’s note: I know what you are thinking. Being eaten alive by bugs has nothing to do with writing and, with the possible exception of Leiningen Versus the Ants, you would be right.

    What does have to do with writing is the color I found and continued to capture when the sun was completely down. For the first time in my life, I watched as deep purple fell over the landscape. No, not purplish or somewhat shadowy violet. Deep purple. And it fell.

    The lyrics to the song were written in 1938 or I might have been compelled to write them that evening, mosquitoes and all.

    Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi RAW ISO 100 f/11 130mm 0.5s

  • The Orton Effect

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    Tango

    Just before the rain, the light shifted and the color temperature warmed making the tango geranium look almost surreal.

    I shot the photo in RAW.

    Next, I used the Orton Effect to take advantage of the particularly brilliant color of the flower, then used a layer mask to remove the effect from the center of the bloom while retaining it in the rest of the photo.

    The image was imported into Photoshop in the ProPhoto color space. This is the only space large enough to work where reds and oranges would not be clipped. When I was finished with the editing, it was then converted to sRGB and sized for web.

    There is a certain amount of ‘glow’ with the effect and now, so many years later, I may dig out the original photo and see what else I can do with it. I’ll keep you posted!

    Writer’s note: Are there some things we just can’t salvage? Yes, of course, but if you are still looking at it years later, there is something about it that works.

    What brings you back?

    Discover the element that works and build the rest around it.

    Don’t do so much that it obscures the original though.

    Orton Effect on Tango Geranium