Shooting Foliage

Lake Arrowhead, Milton, VT

As you may or may not know I live in Vermont. One thing we are known for here besides farming and Maple Syrup is the amazing foliage our Green Mountains have on display every year. Most years I have not even really stopped to take stock in how gorgeous it is or how many photo opps I had. I am afflicted with S.A.D. and it always kicks in this time of year.

Always, that is, until this year. Having this DSLR camera and the capability to express myself artistically in a way that fits my lifestyle (i.e. 2 schoolies and a 1 year old) has done amazing things for my depression. It gets me out there, it gets me thinking of new ways to look at things, and it distracts me from my demons. Even if no one will ever see the hundreds of thousands of photos that I have taken over the past few years and into the next part of my life at least I have one more day here on this Earth.

OK enough about me. Let's get to the foliage! Well since I have had several absolutely breathtaking days to get out with my camera and the stroller (or the baby hiking backpack) I probably took about 1200 photos. Not kidding. Of course I whittle them down to several hundred, and ultimately share about 250. One of the issues I ran into was the positioning of the sun's effect on what my camera chose to wash out. If the sun was behind me, great! The sky came out this vivid blue and the leaves were their brightest orange, yellow, red, and green.

BUT if the sun was in front of me at all, or to the side, it would wash out the sky and make the leaves look dark and yucky:

You can see by the upper left that the sky is blue with some clouds in it but let's be honest, this picture is kind of blah.

What is happening is the camera metered the amount of light it would need based on the darker tree, which in turn caused the sky to be overexposed. There is something your camera does called White Balance. Most cameras, even the one on your phone, have a way to adjust it. Auto white balance is good for beginners, or if you had a sunny day like this one you would set it to Sunny. Also you can try dialing the exposure compensation down a few notches which would tell the camera to take in less light data. Another thing to try is to quicken the shutter speed, and/or tighten up the aperture a bit. It will take some playing around to get it just right. The photo below is an example of the Aperture at F11 and the Shutter Speed at 1/1000 of a second. Oddly enough, I accidentally left the ISO at 800 which normally would have overexposed it but the shutter speed was so quick it didn't matter. It may have had an even darker blue sky if I had set it to 200 like I should have!

To see an album full of delightful foliage photos please visit my Picasa Web Album!

Overexposure!!!

I was lucky enough to do an 11 person family portrait over the last weekend. It is fall here in VT and it has been super rainy. We had hoped to do it by a picnic area locally but this is what it looked like after we got 4" of rain in one day:

From Flood!!!!

Yikes!! So we had to nix that idea. Luckily the backyard of the family has a nice tree line so we were able to utilize the space there and creatively so! The owner has a daycare so there are lots of fun play structures in her fenced in yard but we were able to work around them and also use them as "props" for a few pics!

The problem, and the reason for my post's title was that the sun came in and out that day. It was a gorgeous day don't get me wrong, but we did the session at noon and there were lots of little clouds going over the sun and then leaving. Direct sunlight at high noon even in the fall is a little hard to work around when taking photos of people. You want them to come out natural looking, not pasty ghosts!! I found that when the clouds would cover the sun they came out great, but then all the sudden I would be snapping away and BAM the sun would blaze down. Sadly some of my best poses (you know, the ones where everyone was actually looking at the camera!) happened during these times of brightness. My camera was set to handle the cloudiness so those came out washed out looking. How do I fix it? I can't afford the fancy photo editing software at this time so I am using Picasa for all my needs. Picasa doesn't have an obvious exposure fixer at this time. These are the options for "Effects" editing:

Lots of fun stuff, but how do I fix a photo like this:

I scratched my head and even wanted to cry for a minute. This family is rightfully expecting their photos to look professional. I am a perfectionist and I also am afflicted with clinical depression. One way I have found to deal with both these issues is to try things that perhaps no one else would try. Sometimes those are the things that work the best. I clicked on several of these effects to see what would happen. I am not afraid with Picasa because things are so easy to reverse and the program saves a backup of your originals automatically.

The last one I tried is the one in the bottom right hand corner called Graduated Tint. It's description says "Useful mainly for skies". Well, there are no skies in my photos but let's see what happens anyhow.

Voila! It worked!! I kind of like how Picasa doesn't hold your hand completely through everything (perhaps they don't know all of the program's capabilities in every instance anyhow...it IS a Google program and they like you, the user, to explore!) so that you can make these reaffirming discoveries on your own.

The trick to using Graduated Tint is not to touch the color palette at all. Simply click on the icon, then use the "Shade" slider moving to the right to darken the exposure until it looks halfway normal.

You will also notice a target in the center of your photo.

What I did with this was drag it all the way down to the bottom of the screen to give the entire picture an even exposure change. The purpose of the target really is for skies. If you have a horizon line like this:

You see how the way the camera metered the light was based more on the darker lower half of the screen where the land and trees are. The sky looks washed out. This will only work if you can see SOME color in your sky. If you have one of those completely whited out skies it will really not help at all. What you do is put your target just above the horizon line and then start sliding the shade lever over. You will see the colors in your sky look more and more natural. Make sure you don't over do it though or it will look freaky. Then use the other slider, the Feather slider, to blend the bottom so that it looks like you never did a thing ;)

(Note: I also used the Shadows tool to bring out the colors in the trees, and the straightening tool to turn it slightly which removed the telephone wire in the upper right corner! Told you I am a perfectionist lol)

I hope this was useful for someone out there! I know it saved my butt :)