Here’s a diverse bunch of images taken yesterday. I made the Image of the Day when I left the Underground and was greeted by blinding light. Initially the blinding factor didn’t come across that well. Sometimes the dynamic range of a scene is so completely over the top, that you can’t possibly show it. In those cases you have to make a decision.
In my case I decided for detail in the wall and for a hint of blue sky. I could have recovered the blue completely, but somehow that makes the scene only dull. I added some light behind the man, making him go into the light, and now it seemed just right, now it was an image about him.
But still, it was not blinding. A quick comparison with the original from the camera revealed why: in the original the upper left part of the wall was burnt out. I added more light up there and finally arrived at the image that you see, a blinding image about a man getting away 🙂
Truth is, it’s not so entirely different from what the camera saw, but it has been re-lit in some very important aspects.
The moral of the story? Never fear damaging your histogram. If it burns out and if that is what makes the image look right, for heaven’s sake let it burn!
Remember the blue sky in the background of yesterday’s post? People like it and I like it, but it is wrong. It was processed to look good (and I think it does), but it does not look as a sky looks. The processing emulates the effect of a polarizer. This look has become so much of a cliché, and more than that, quasi our mind’s reference for what a sky should look like, that I begin to question it.
Today’s sky has been substantially lightened and desaturated, at least relative to the rest of the image. It is still slightly on the dramatic side, but probably not unbelievably so. In any case I’m going to be more careful with my skies and I’ll try to not blindly follow the conventions.
I took the image of the wall and the doors for its pattern quality, and in the image of the street crossing, it was the quality of light that struck me.
Btw, you see a man waiting (see the full size on Flickr) and he has a blue, checkered shirt. Well, this is a case where I had moiré in the image. The OM-D really seems to have a relatively weak low-pass filter and such regular patterns are what triggers moiré. No problem, in Lightroom I brushed selective moiré correction over the shirt and it was easily gone.
The Song of the Day is “The Man That Got Away” from “A Star Is Born”. I have versions by Ella Fitzgerald, Cher, Sheena Easton and Judy Garland. I’ve already used Judy Garland’s version in “1138 – The Man That Got Away”, Ella would have been the natural choice of the day, but because I couldn’t find her version on YouTube, it’s Judy one more time. You hopefully still won’t mind 🙂
Flo (tonebytone) (2012-07-18)
The man that is going away looks like he's also supporting that pole on top of his head. Supposedly, that's also a no-no, lol. But to get the shot, you had to click when he was at that particular place, or you would have lost the opportunity. Blue skies. They have changed over the years, due to increased humidity/smog and also by the UN spraying chemtrails. So usually our skies are just a pale reflection of what we had even 30-40 years ago. Polarizers allow us to relive those wonderful deep blue skies of yore - that is, it we don't overuse them. I love the patterns of light and shadow in your third image. But for the last one, even in the larger size, I wouldn't have been able to tell whether the man's shirt was plaid, checked or moiré-ed.
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