013 - April 30, 2010
Answering your questions: “What Makes a Good Picture –
Part 4 – The scenery was a lot prettier than my picture – What happened?
Here’s something that nearly all of us have experienced. You vacationed in an area with spectacular scenery and took lots of photos. Now you’re home from your vacation, uploaded your photos to your computer and you’re viewing your photos on a larger monitor. And they just don’t look as nice as the scene that you photographed; after all, you would expect to have some really spectacular photos from that scenery. There may be a few things you can do to recover some of your photos. We’ll get to that, since it’s all related to how you took the picture in the first place. For developing and recovering photos, I prefer to use Adobe PhotoShop Elements, or its big brother - and more expensive – Adobe Photoshop (soon coming out with CS5 version). I only mentioned Adobe because they have good programs that work well on both Apple and PC platforms. You can usually download trial versions of photo editing programs to try before you buy.
For this article, I have to assume that you have the patience to frame the photo, press the shutter button half-way down to let the camera set the exposure, take in a breath and exhale partly (to help steady the camera), then press the button the rest of the way to take the photo. So here are some more tips.
Lighting for your scenery and landscape photos will be best in the morning (before about 10am) or late afternoon/ evening (after about 4-5pm) – and ideally with the sun at your back. Mid-day photos will tend to have much harsher shadows and may tend to have a slight blue tinge to them. If you have photos like this, load it on to your computer and adjust the temperature of the file ( move the temperature adjustment slider away from blue). While you’re on the computer, you can open up some of the shadow tones so they aren’t quite so stark. If your sky got blown out from overexposure, you probably can’t do much for that sky, but you can even replace the bad sky with blue sky, rainbows, birds, storm clouds and lightning, or nearly anything else you can imagine.
If you’re about to take another photo and think this picture will have all the problems that you fixed in the previous paragraph, take time to bracket your exposure – many cameras will have an automatic setting for this – or you can do it manually. When you bracket an exposure, place the camera on a tripod or dead-rest and take 3 exposures of the same scene: the first exposure under-exposed by a full f-stop, the second at a normal exposure, the third over-exposed by a full f-stop. The first exposure may be kind of dark, but the sky shouldn’t be blown out, in the second exposure, the midtones should be about right, and in the third exposure the dark tones and shadows should be fairly clear, but will likely overexpose the sky. When you get to your computer, either program mentioned above can do an amazing job at combining the best parts of the 3 photos into one with the shadows bright enough to see, the midtones clear, and the highlights (sky) not blown out. Adobe calls this merging to HDR (High Definition Range).
How about that breath-taking landscape photo from halfway up the mountain? You need to photograph about a 270 degree wide view, but you can’t get it all into the viewfinder; and even the part that you can get in the viewfinder is mostly sky and the grass under your feet; and all the details you want in the picture will be so tiny you won’t be able to make them out. Try this: ideally, with your camera on a tripod and tilted 90 degrees (for a portrait orientation photo), take a series of photos, panning from one side to the other. It’s important, as you take each successive picture, that each frame overlaps the previous frame by about 30%. Also very important, don’t change the lens length (don’t zoom in or out) during this series. Now, back at the computer again, either program mentioned above will do an excellent job of “stitching” the series of photos together into one very wide panorama. I’ll post a couple of “stitched” panorama photos on my website. If you want to print your panorama, you may have to call around to see who can print that size, but it’s not difficult to put together a 24” x 72” photo. Taking eye-catching scenery photos does take practice, so don’t be afraid to try different ideas and techniques.
Tip #1: Take lots of pictures with the intent (this is reality) that you’ll discard about 80% of them (getting 20% keepers is a pretty good average!).
Tip #2: Don’t take just one photo of the great scenery that you’ll see. Take time to do several exposures of the scene you want to record; bracket the exposures, try different framing and camera orientation, different lens lengths, even try slightly different angles. You don’t always have to stand up straight to snap the photo; shooting from low to the ground can provide eye-catching perspective.
Tip #3: Take your time to set up your shot. A hurried shot is usually a blurred shot.
Tip #4: Try to shoot your landscape photos when the sun creates better lighting – not just mid-day.
Tip #5: Take your time determining what it is you really like about the scene; then try to capture that aspect or focal point. Often, the most enjoyment in photography is absorbing the beauty of the scene.
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