Boy at Sunset
This picture tells the story of combining moving my vantage point with cropping to get the image I was after. I am learning that one of the skills of a photographer's "eye" is being able to identify small parts of the total field of view as being complete photos in the raw. The task then is to capture, process, and present so the viewer sees only and immediately what I want them to see.
f4.5 at 1/400 -0.7eV 72mm (432 mm equivalent) 2816 x 2112 Canon S3
Essence: This boy and another one were on logs that flanked a cattle grid at about 7:20 as the sun was going down on a California field. I took one picture at about 3x zoom when I was closer, but it had too much detail in the background. This one:
So I walked further away and used full zoom to get the photo at the top. The fast shutter speed and image stabilization removed any shake very effectively.
Accident: I had the exposure adjustment set to -0.7eV because the sun was illuminating some things very brightly and I did not want to blow out the highlights. This scene doesn't have anything that is brightly reflective, so all I did was underexpose it. The histogram looks like this:
On the right, there no pixels that have the top 10% of brightnesses, and very few in the top 20%. The focus is sharp, and the contrast is low enough that fringing is not too bad. I can see green along the right hand side of the arm that hangs down, but it is not distracting. The long lens of the S3 does fringe quite badly at full zoom, so I have to live with that.
Vanity: The original was underexposed, so the first thing I did in Aperture was increased the Exposure setting by 0.3. It didn't need any extra saturation, but I did adjust the temperature to 5030K to warm it slightly. The left side of the face was still too dark and the hair lacked detail, so I lightened the shadows to 10.3 with the Highlights and Shadows control, just enough to see the eyes clearly. Finally I removed the distracting elements by cropping the landscape into a portrait 1474 x 1964 and was able to center the boy's head and frame it between the two logs. The cost of the adjustment plus the underexposure is noise in the shadows (see 100% crop below).
Final image:
100% crop:
f4.5 at 1/400 -0.7eV 72mm (432 mm equivalent) 2816 x 2112 Canon S3
Essence: This boy and another one were on logs that flanked a cattle grid at about 7:20 as the sun was going down on a California field. I took one picture at about 3x zoom when I was closer, but it had too much detail in the background. This one:
So I walked further away and used full zoom to get the photo at the top. The fast shutter speed and image stabilization removed any shake very effectively.
Accident: I had the exposure adjustment set to -0.7eV because the sun was illuminating some things very brightly and I did not want to blow out the highlights. This scene doesn't have anything that is brightly reflective, so all I did was underexpose it. The histogram looks like this:
On the right, there no pixels that have the top 10% of brightnesses, and very few in the top 20%. The focus is sharp, and the contrast is low enough that fringing is not too bad. I can see green along the right hand side of the arm that hangs down, but it is not distracting. The long lens of the S3 does fringe quite badly at full zoom, so I have to live with that.
Vanity: The original was underexposed, so the first thing I did in Aperture was increased the Exposure setting by 0.3. It didn't need any extra saturation, but I did adjust the temperature to 5030K to warm it slightly. The left side of the face was still too dark and the hair lacked detail, so I lightened the shadows to 10.3 with the Highlights and Shadows control, just enough to see the eyes clearly. Finally I removed the distracting elements by cropping the landscape into a portrait 1474 x 1964 and was able to center the boy's head and frame it between the two logs. The cost of the adjustment plus the underexposure is noise in the shadows (see 100% crop below).
Final image:
100% crop:
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