@kenoh posted the great idea for a new thread where the photographer provides a detailed explanation of how they produced a particular photograph of interest.
I was honoured to be asked to kick-off the process with a recent long exposure monochrome posting. Sorry there's no advanced video production here - not much advanced anything to be honest but I hope it shows what can be achieved with relatively little effort.
The software and hardware I used are nothing special in that the same effects can be achieved using a variety of software on any image.
Step 1: I like to have in mind what I would like to ultimately achieve before pressing the shutter button. Doesn't always work out the way I'd hoped but I'm flexible enough to try to salvage something from whatever comes out of the camera. In general, I try to get reasonably close to the 'target' in-camera.
Given the sort of image I was after, I chose a day where the tide was predicted to be very high (looked it up on tide charts on the internet) - it was easy for this to coincide with grey, drab weather - not uncommon for here but ideal for what I was looking for.
Step 2: With wellies on, set up the camera (Canon 6D) on the tripod equipped with my favourite Canon 16-35mm f4L. Fitted the Formatt-Hitech 100mm filter holder on the front ready to take both a circular polariser and a neutral density filter. First question: what density to choose? The choice of density really depends on ambient lighting and the degree of motion blur you want to capture. I was looking for as much blur (i.e. no features in the water) as possible which pointed to a very long exposure. The highest ND filter I have is 16-stop but combined with the CPL, this takes the total density to around 17-stops. Plenty.
I find the 'correct' exposure, focus and framing by setting the camera up without the filter attached. Then using simple arithmetic (and using fingers) I calculate the required exposure by doubling the exposure time from the filter-free period once for each additional stop - 1/200 -> 1/100 -> 1/50 -> 1/25.....
Put the camera in BULB mode, set the aperture to f8 to give good sharpness and decent depth of field for the static objects in the frame. Set the image capture to RAW to get as much flexibility in post as possible.
Then attach filter and a remote timer or manual release (to get beyond the 30-sec inbuilt exposure limit in Canon cameras) and hey presto - time to set the exposure started. The 17-stops was too much for iso100, so I increased iso to 400 to bring the exposure down to a manageable 5 minutes.
The image straight out of camera appears (in Capture One or your favourite RAW processor):
Step 2: Post Processing.
I have nothing against people who spend hours in post or who take a lot of effort to produce composite images but my personal preference is to try to stay reasonably true to what I see taking into account the effect I want to achieve. Laziness, lack of patience and lack of skill in post also tends to push me in that direction.
A crop to 5x7 format to improve composition and a very slight horizon straightening yielded:
More pleasing composition to my eye at least but the 'minimalist' goal was spoiled a bit by that distracting yellow line. Time to get out the healing brush tool (or equivalent). Again with my gentle-touch approach to post, I didn't take it out completely:
That's better. Not much colour cast from the filter(s) but the weather made the image almost monochromatic so begged for a black and white conversion.
Depending on the software you use, there are several ways of conducting colour-to-mono conversions. I tend to use the "enable black and white" option in Capture One. This gives the ability to adjust the individual colour channels in the image to provide the effect of having coloured filters in the days of B&W film (e.g. red filter darkens blue sky etc). In this image, I left the channels alone to yield:
STEP 3 : Making an Impact
Not a bad minimalist image but a bit meah...not minimalist enough to be 'artistic' and not dramatic enough to be a good landscape shot (in my opinion at least). What can we do to give it a bit of a boost?
Despite the almost monotonous sky, it does have some long-exposure structure so might as well make use of it. Select the sky portion of the image using whatever tools you like (selection mask in Capture One) and boost the contrast in the sky using a CURVES adjustment (darken the dark-to-mid tones of the sky) and add some negative vignette:
That's better. But the water now looks a bit flat. There was some low-angle light in the original image reflecting off the water surface so try to enhance that by selecting the water and applying a CURVE adjustment to the water where we lighten the mid-to-highlight tones:
And there is the finished image.
As you can hopefully see, there wasn't a lot of post processing involved. In fact the total post processing took literally 10- to 15- minutes, most of which was simply playing with the degree of adjustment at each step until it looked about right to me.
Ultimately the image is more complex than the 'minimalist' image I had in mind at the start of the process but at the end of the day, I'm happy with this particular photo. Some of the other images I took that day conformed more to the 'minimalist' theme I was after (principally as a result of using slight over-exposure to lose even more sky/water detail) but for me the important thing was to produce some satisfying images from a short (1 hour) trip to this location on a wet Sunday afternoon when no-one in their right mind was out and about.
Hope you found this useful or even informative, I've enjoyed doing it.
I was honoured to be asked to kick-off the process with a recent long exposure monochrome posting. Sorry there's no advanced video production here - not much advanced anything to be honest but I hope it shows what can be achieved with relatively little effort.
The software and hardware I used are nothing special in that the same effects can be achieved using a variety of software on any image.
Step 1: I like to have in mind what I would like to ultimately achieve before pressing the shutter button. Doesn't always work out the way I'd hoped but I'm flexible enough to try to salvage something from whatever comes out of the camera. In general, I try to get reasonably close to the 'target' in-camera.
Given the sort of image I was after, I chose a day where the tide was predicted to be very high (looked it up on tide charts on the internet) - it was easy for this to coincide with grey, drab weather - not uncommon for here but ideal for what I was looking for.
Step 2: With wellies on, set up the camera (Canon 6D) on the tripod equipped with my favourite Canon 16-35mm f4L. Fitted the Formatt-Hitech 100mm filter holder on the front ready to take both a circular polariser and a neutral density filter. First question: what density to choose? The choice of density really depends on ambient lighting and the degree of motion blur you want to capture. I was looking for as much blur (i.e. no features in the water) as possible which pointed to a very long exposure. The highest ND filter I have is 16-stop but combined with the CPL, this takes the total density to around 17-stops. Plenty.
I find the 'correct' exposure, focus and framing by setting the camera up without the filter attached. Then using simple arithmetic (and using fingers) I calculate the required exposure by doubling the exposure time from the filter-free period once for each additional stop - 1/200 -> 1/100 -> 1/50 -> 1/25.....
Put the camera in BULB mode, set the aperture to f8 to give good sharpness and decent depth of field for the static objects in the frame. Set the image capture to RAW to get as much flexibility in post as possible.
Then attach filter and a remote timer or manual release (to get beyond the 30-sec inbuilt exposure limit in Canon cameras) and hey presto - time to set the exposure started. The 17-stops was too much for iso100, so I increased iso to 400 to bring the exposure down to a manageable 5 minutes.
The image straight out of camera appears (in Capture One or your favourite RAW processor):
Step 2: Post Processing.
I have nothing against people who spend hours in post or who take a lot of effort to produce composite images but my personal preference is to try to stay reasonably true to what I see taking into account the effect I want to achieve. Laziness, lack of patience and lack of skill in post also tends to push me in that direction.
A crop to 5x7 format to improve composition and a very slight horizon straightening yielded:
More pleasing composition to my eye at least but the 'minimalist' goal was spoiled a bit by that distracting yellow line. Time to get out the healing brush tool (or equivalent). Again with my gentle-touch approach to post, I didn't take it out completely:
That's better. Not much colour cast from the filter(s) but the weather made the image almost monochromatic so begged for a black and white conversion.
Depending on the software you use, there are several ways of conducting colour-to-mono conversions. I tend to use the "enable black and white" option in Capture One. This gives the ability to adjust the individual colour channels in the image to provide the effect of having coloured filters in the days of B&W film (e.g. red filter darkens blue sky etc). In this image, I left the channels alone to yield:
STEP 3 : Making an Impact
Not a bad minimalist image but a bit meah...not minimalist enough to be 'artistic' and not dramatic enough to be a good landscape shot (in my opinion at least). What can we do to give it a bit of a boost?
Despite the almost monotonous sky, it does have some long-exposure structure so might as well make use of it. Select the sky portion of the image using whatever tools you like (selection mask in Capture One) and boost the contrast in the sky using a CURVES adjustment (darken the dark-to-mid tones of the sky) and add some negative vignette:
That's better. But the water now looks a bit flat. There was some low-angle light in the original image reflecting off the water surface so try to enhance that by selecting the water and applying a CURVE adjustment to the water where we lighten the mid-to-highlight tones:
And there is the finished image.
As you can hopefully see, there wasn't a lot of post processing involved. In fact the total post processing took literally 10- to 15- minutes, most of which was simply playing with the degree of adjustment at each step until it looked about right to me.
Ultimately the image is more complex than the 'minimalist' image I had in mind at the start of the process but at the end of the day, I'm happy with this particular photo. Some of the other images I took that day conformed more to the 'minimalist' theme I was after (principally as a result of using slight over-exposure to lose even more sky/water detail) but for me the important thing was to produce some satisfying images from a short (1 hour) trip to this location on a wet Sunday afternoon when no-one in their right mind was out and about.
Hope you found this useful or even informative, I've enjoyed doing it.
