Twilight is the most dynamic time to photograph architecture and cityscapes. This is the time just before dark when the sky is cobalt blue.  If  you shoot earlier than this — dusk — the sky has more light in it and therefore your exposure is shorter.  This means that the artificial lights of the city won’t be as bright in the final picture (because the shorter exposure won’t accumulate as much light as when the shutter is open longer).  If you wait until twilight, the mixture of the cobalt sky with the yellowish color of the artificial lights is stunning.

The two examples here show you what I’m referring to.  The image above, which is the spectacular Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the incredible train station in Lisbon, Portugal, below, look good when photographed in daylight, but at night they are especially beautiful.

Note that the sky in both pictures is not black as it would have been had I shot a few minutes later.  That makes a big difference.

When you anticipate action, keep your eye glued to the viewfinder.  The moment

you look at the subject(s) directly and the peak action occurs, you’ll miss the shot.

The fraction of a section that it takes to look through the camera again and shoot

means that it will be too late to capture that special instant in time.

In addition, switch your drive mode from one shot to multi.  When the

action starts, keep firing until it’s over.

For the two stallions I shot last week in France during my photo workshop

to shoot the white horses of the Camargue (which will be repeated in April,

2013), I used 400 ISO to make sure my shutter speed would be fast enough

to freeze even the flying manes and the kicking feet.  In addition, I used Program

mode because this automatically gave me the fastest shutter speed, minus

1/3 f/stop, given the light conditions and the ISO.  This way, I didn’t have to

think about the camera settings.  I could direct all of my attention to the horses

and wait for the peak action between them.

Many people ask me what wide angle lens to buy, so let me say here that I am

a big fan of ultra wide angle lenses.  For full frame sensor cameras, I recom-

mend a lens in the 14mm to 16mm range, and for less-than-full-frame cameras,

a lens in the 10mm to 12mm range is excellent (such as the Canon 10-22mm or

the Nikon 12-24mm lens).  These lenses produce incredibly dramatic images.

For example, I just finished leading a photo tour to Portugal and Spain, and one

of thehighlights was photographing the incredible staircase in the Lello bookstore

in Porto, Portugal.  The color, graphic design, and the light all come to-

gether to make an outstanding image, but it was my 14mm lens that enabled me

to really capture the essence and the beauty of the architecture.  Lesser angles

obtained from 18 to 24mm wide angle lenses produce a nice shot, but it is the

extreme width of the 14mm that makes this subject especially compelling.

I used the same lens when I photographed a stunning 18th century carriage

in the National Carriage Museum in Lisbon.  In the below photo, I replaced

the background, but the width of the lens created this expanded and very

dramatic view of the carriage.

Ultra wide angle lenses are most dramatic when used very close to the subject.

I photographed this elderly man in Jodhpur, India a couple of weeks ago, and in

the original picture I felt the background was distracting.  The background

certainly gave a sense of place, and it shows what this scene looked like, but in

terms of a fine art picture , I didn’t like it.

I didn’t have an image in my files that matched the marble designs behind him,

so I  useda section of a decorative door I photographed also in India.  That

eliminated the problem.  There is a part of me that feels the juxtaposition of

these two very different materials don’t look good together, but then I’ve seen a

lot of things like this in India so I decided to leave it the way it is.

Don’t underestimate the power of a background to negatively impact a picture –

or to help make the picture successful.  Distracting backgrounds should be

avoided whenever possible.  If you can’t capture a complementary background

at the time of shooting, make it happen in post-processing.

When I give lectures, lead photo tours, or teach online, I often tell students

that white backgrounds are distracting.  In most cases, that’s true.  Our eyes

are drawn to the lightest parts of a picture first, and that means that if the

subject is darker than the light background, our eyes are diverted away from

the subject.  This is not how a successful picture is supposed to work.

 
There are exceptions to every rule in art, of course, and the portrait I took in

Johdpur, India two days ago is an example.  In this case, I feel the white

background compliments the subject.  It adds to the ethereal nature of this

image, and it’s not distracting at all.

The photo above was taken a few days ago during my annual Venice photo-

graphy workshop. This is a 17th century palace, and the interior of the room

is much darker than the bright daylight seen through the windows.  Due to

the extreme contrast — in other words, the large discrepancy in exposure

between the model and the windows — I had three choices in dealing with

this situation:

1.  I could expose correctly for the model and the interior and allow the

windows to blow out.

2.  I could expose for the windows which would make the model very dark

and the room would also be underexposed significantly.

3.  I could use an artificial light source, like a flash, to lighten the model

and then expose for both the windows and her — but then the high ceiling

and the walls would be very dark. In order to light this cavernous room, I

would need an enormous number of lights and it would take two days to do

it correctly.

I opted to expose correctly for the model and the room and allow the

windows to blow out.  Usually, blown highlights are something to avoid.  In

this case, I feel that the very light curtains and the overexposed daylight adds

an ethereal quality to this picture.  I like it a lot even though, in most cases, this

is usually something I avoid.

If you are not shooting landscapes at sunrise and sunset, you are missing the best photo opportunities.  I’m not talking about early morning or late afternoon; rather I’m specifically referring to the first few minutes after the sun peeks above the horizon and the last few minutes before it disappears in the evening.  It is these magical times that the golden light is spectacular, as you can see in the sunrise shot on Torres del Paine in Patagonia, Chile.

It is certainly disappointing if you get up before dawn, drive somewhere in the dark, and wait for what you hope will be a beautiful sunrise, only to see a cloud cover that obliterates the sun.  But when nature cooperates, it’s true magic.  It’s worth the hassle because you will enjoy the wonderful images you’ve captured forever.

I just got back from leading a photo tour to Chile.  The photography was varied and dramatic, from penguins to exotic wild parrots to some of the most incredible mountains on the planet.  I hoped to see and photograph an Andean condor, and I got one decent shot of one (below) sitting on a rock ledge above a glacial lake.  This was taken with a 500mm f/4 IS Canon lens plus a 1.4x teleconverter — and I hand held the monster lens on a boat!  I raised the ISO until the shutter speed was fast enough to freeze the inherent movement I had to deal with.  To insure the sharpest pictures with a telephoto lens, the shutter speed should be at least the reciprocal of the focal length.  In other words, if you are using a 700mm lens (as I was), the shutter speed should ideally be 1/700th of a second or faster.

When you shoot in the RAW format, you must process the picture files in Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom before they can be opened directly into Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. There is a tool in these RAW converters that I consider one of the great advances in photographic technology. It is the fill light slider, and it allows you to open up the shadows in a picture, thus revealing detail that was either very dark and muted or simply invisible because it was so underexposed.  Sometimes black shadows contribute to the graphic nature of a picture, but most of the time the ideal is to reveal as much detail as possible throughout an image.

How far can you go in lightening shadows? Don’t you increase digital noise when you do this? The answers are you can go quite far, and yes, you do increase noise. However, you can mitigate the noise so it is basically irrelevant, allowing you to do amazing things as I demonstrate with the pictures in this article.

I took the picture of the ship I was sailing on in the Falkland Islands, above, as I was on my way down to Antarctica a year ago. My group had gone ashore to photograph rockhopper penguins, and we stayed until dusk. On the way back to the ship, I thought the vessel looked beautiful in the late twilight illuminated against the dark, cobalt sky.

To say the situation was dark, though, is an understatement. I could hardly see anything except the lights on the ship and their reflection in the surface of the ocean. I was in a dinghy bobbing up and down in the waves, and this meant that I was in an impossible photographic situation — too much movement in a very dark situation. I had nothing to lose by taking some shots, however, so I went out of my comfort zone and bumped the ISO to 6400 just to see what would happen. To be honest, I had never used an ISO setting this high before because I hate digital noise, and I thought the images would be totally useless. Even with 6400 ISO, my shutter speed was only 1/5th of a second with my f/4 lens wide open. I thought there was no way this could turn out to be a sharp picture, and at the same time I was certain the noise would be so large and offensive that I’d trash the images when I got home – or sooner.

I was both right and wrong. The pictures all had horrible noise as you can see in a small portion of the image captured at 100% magnification on my monitor, above. For my own sense of aesthetics, this makes the picture unacceptable. I wouldn’t want a print of it, and I couldn’t sell it. However, I was shocked that out of the dozen images I took, this one was surprisingly sharp. This was luck, not skill, because a 1/5th of a second exposure from a bobbing dinghy is a guaranteed formula for a blurred picture. Image stabilization would be of no help at all in a situation like this. I took the shots of the ship when we crested on a wave or when we were in a trough in an attempt to shoot with minimum motion.  Still, I was really lucky to get an image that turned out to be fairly sharp.

Ok, so I had an underexposed picture of the ship with little detail, and the noise ruined the image even if I accepted the underexposure, which I didn’t.

 When I opened the image in Adobe Camera Raw, I used the fill light slider to open up the shadows (knowing the results would be terrible), and you can see in the screen capture, below, how far I moved the slider to the right.

This provided incredible detail in the ship and in the water – much more than I could see with my eyes from the dinghy — but the digital noise became even more pronounced. In another screen capture, below, you can see that the price I had to pay for the additional detail was giant noise in the shadows, and the night sky, which now has great color and exposure, is so noisy that to make a print of this would be ridiculous.  If I had a choice between showing a print of this to a client or eating worms, I’d take the worms!

Ok, here is where the plot thickens. To save this image, I opened up Nik Software’s Dfine 2.0 and I let the program loose on this shot. I used the automatic function, letting Dfine 2.0 do its magic. When it was finished, I applied it a second time, and look at the results in the below image. The picture is amazing. The noise is gone, the colors look great, and there is unexpected detail in the shadows that

were so dark one would assume there was no way to salvage those areas of the image. To reinforce my point, study the screen capture of the ‘after’ image taken at 100%, below. You see no noise.  While the picture isn’t razor sharp like it would have been with a fast shutter speed and a low ISO, it’s quite acceptable, especially under the circumstances. The fact that it’s not tack sharp has nothing to do with using the Nik Software. That was caused because of the extremely slow shutter. Having said that, it is definitely sharp enough to be reproduced in a magazine.

What a great time it is to be a photographer!

If you buy Dfine 2.0 by Nik Software or any of their products, use the discount code JZUCKERMAN and you’ll save 15%.  I consider this software essential gear.

There are two things about this picture that are good and one thing that’s

terrible.  I like the low perspective from which took the picture, and I also

like the ears flared out.  Both of these make the huge elephant seem even

more impressive.  The terrible aspect of this image is the white sky. It’s

very distracting.

To replace this sky is impossible using any of the selection tools in Photo-

shop because the fine grasses blend with the background in such a way that

they can’t be separated.  None of the other software programs like Topaz

Remask 3 or Mask Pro 4 by onOne could do justice with this scene, either.

I could make the sky a solid blue color with Nik Software’s Viveza 2, but that

wouldn’t be appropriate.  The diffused light calls for an overcast sky to make

this look believable.

There is only one solution.  I used a layer mask in Photoshop to pro-

duce the image below.  Here is the process.

1.  Choose a sky full of gray clouds.  It should be similar in resolution to

the elephant photo.

2.  Copy the clouds to the clipboard with Select > all, and then Edit > copy.

3.  Paste the clouds on top of the elephant photo with Edit > paste.

4.  Make sure the foreground and background color boxes at the bottom

of the tools palette are black/white, respectively.

5.  Make a layer mask using Layer > layer mask > reveal all (or use the

shortcut — the small icon immediately to the right of the fx icon at the

bottom of the layers palette).

6.  Choose the gradient tool.  Drag the cursor from the bottom of the

clouds to the top.  The bottom portion of the clouds disappear gradually,

as you can see, leaving the elephant and the grass exposed but covering

the sky.  You can vary the demarcation line between the clouds and the

clear bottom portion of the image by varying how long you drag the

cursor in the photo. If you drag it an inch, the line will be hard.  If you

drag it four inches, the line will be softer, more gradual.

7.  There will still be some clouds on the elephant, so now choose the

brush tool and brush them away.  If you make a mistake and brush

some of the sky away, reverse the black/white color boxes so they are

now white/black and paint the clouds back.  When you do this touch

up, work at 200% or so.

I like very few images from my early days in photography.  As one’s visual

maturity develops, our standards are raised and initial attempts at creativ-

ity seem, well, somewhat embarrassing as we look back.  One of the pictures

I have always loved, though, that I took within two years of owning a

camera is this double exposure of a candle flame done with color infra-red

film.  I used two different color filters over the lens — an orange filter that

produced the yellow flame and a blue filter that produced the magenta

color.  This was taken about 1971, and I don’t remember the camera data.

But color infra-red was one of my favorite tools for creating unusual color

relationships.

You could also cross-process color infra-red.  It was an E-4 chemical

process, and if you used C-22 chemicals (designed for color negative film),

the results were a negative image plus complementary colors … but com-

plements of the wild infra-red colors.  The image below is a shot of a reflec-

tion in water of a group of school kids leaving an auditorium after seeing a

play.  I took it with color infra-red that was processed in C-22 chemistry.

I haven’t shown either of these images for 30 years.