The Neighborhood

As some have noticed I have not posted in quite a while. In fact, I’ve taken no landscape photos since August when we sold our sail boat and bought a power boat. The process included a number of significant upgrades to the new boat and the transition to a new floating tripod commanded my full attention.

So, to get the photo juices flowing I was motivated to record what has been a particularly lush New Zealand late Spring / early Summer. The attached shots taken immediately around our house on the Banks Peninsula hopefully convey how lush and alive this season has been.

The photos were straightforward but there were three things I had to control to insure they were not just bland snaps: the time of day, color balance and dealing with a very big range of light.

Normally I shoot at either end of the day when the light is warm and I started with a series that had a lot of yellow. Unfortunately, they looked wrong, rendering the predominant greens a sickly orange green. Not a good look. So, all but the two telephoto shots of distant hills and sky were taken in mid-day sun. But not full raw sun which would have blown out highlights and blocked shadows. There was a bit of cloud cover that softened highlights and preserved shadow detail.

I also found color temperature (also referred to as white balance) important. I always shoot with the camera set to automatic white balance so I don’t have to put in a setting for each lighting situation. This is fine and gets me in the ball park for the correct color temperature but I invariably have to make a small but important adjustment to the overall picture when I process the RAW file in Lightroom. The blue cool to yellow warm adjustment is often not very much but makes an important difference in conveying the image. Color is incredibly emotional and if tones don’t seem natural the viewer knows that something is off immediately.

Most of my color balance adjustments are global for the whole picture but very occasionally I adjust only one or two specific subjects or areas in the picture. This is the case with the closeup of the yellow Brachyglottis shrub. The yellow flowers in the initial RAW file looked too orange and I isolated them with Lightroom’s color selection tool. This allows an adjustment to only the flowers while every other color is protected by a mask. This is a new feature in Lightroom that has long been a feature of just Photoshop.

The third thing I had to do with all the shots was to bring down the extreme lightness of the skys in the RAW files. This is usually the case where it is impossible to capture the full range of light in a balanced pleasing way in a single frame. As long as the digital data has registered in the file, post processing can usually bring the overly bright sky into balance with the darker foreground. Normally I can do this with a straightforward Lightroom gradient tool application over the sky and reduce exposure plus an expansion of the mid-range tones with the Clarity adjustment control.

Most of the time I don’t make a specific selection of the sky and mask the rest of the picture but occasionally the best result is from a Select and Mask step in Photoshop. However, the new Lightroom has an expanded masking set of controls including an artificial intelligence sky selection tool. Pretty effective and with the ability to add and subtract from the initial selection another reason to not worry about having Photoshop.

Just doing this basic project has definitely increased my motivation to spend lots more time being creative with photography and less time spent crawling around in the bilge.