Lake Michigan beside the Sleeping Bear Dunes shows a gradient of colors in the sun. The distant deep water looks purple, closer to the shore it turns blue. Small waves breaking on the sand are turquoise green.
Photographers, please advise how to avoid pixel saturation due to the glare of the sun.
Birgit,
You’ve captured a nice moment. I like the three bands of color, especially in their simplified, more abstract appearance in the right half of the image. You mention the far-off purple as well; I wonder if that could have been captured with a different camera angle.
Regarding saturation, you may be in trouble. There are several ways of dealing with the problem of limited dynamic range, but all are problematic with this subject. A standard method to reduce glare is a polaroid filter over the lens (correctly oriented), but your blown-out white looks to be mostly (not all) from foam, so the light from it will be mostly unpolarized. Another method, especially with digital cameras, is multiple images with different exposure times, so that you can blend intact highlights from a short exposure into the exposure appropriate for most of the scene. But unless you can get the wave to stand still for you, that won’t work here. I would say you’re best chance is to just make a shorter exposure to at least capture more detail in the highlights. The rest of the water will appear too dark, but you can then adjust that with software to get the look you want. You might be able to do that pretty well here, since noise that appears in originally dark regions could be blurred away or otherwise handled without losing the broad color effects in the water; you don’t need fine detail in that area. If this were black and white (and maybe even in color, I’m less familiar with that), you could even switch to film, with its nonlinear response curve, and then “burn in” the highlights when printing. All in all, polarizer and reduced exposure seem the best bet to me. But since other photographers on this blog seem to live near a coast, you may get better advice from them.
Thank you, Steve,
Next summer, I will work on those waves again with a polarizer and reduced exposure.
Now in the winter, the same advice should also work for snowy scenes. For the frozen landscape, I will also try multiple images with different exposure times.
Being fond of color and frustrated by the scratches Kodak made on my negatives, I have abandoned my terrific 30 yr-old Nikon macrolens in favor of a lesser digital camera. It is time to get an SLR digital camera.
Birgit,
I have been making photographs of waves here in San Diego. It is remarkable how different the water looks. This must in part have to do with the lack of fine sand/mud particles that one sees in the water in Wilhelmshaven.
Birgit,
If your camera shows you a histogram on the display – either pre or post exposure – then you can keep an eye on what the whites are going to do.
This tutorial, expose-right may help. As might this one: understanding histograms. To offer more specific advice, one would need to know exactly what controls and information that your camera gives.
As the subject of “lesser” cameras, this is one area where the cheaper cameras are better. Digital SLRs can’t show you the exposure histogram before the shot. Digicams, with their always on displays and no moving mirror, can.
Hi Colin,
Thank you for the links to the tutorials. A histogram after the exposure (presently on my Canon powershot) is good enough for imaging waves that keep on rolling in. By the time, I would photograph children playing on the beach, I may have learned the proper exposures.
Mmmmhhhhhh its funny the reaction that I had to this foto! The colour and the texture of the waves made my mouth watery mhhhhhhhh beautiful!
Birgit,
I have a similar physical reaction to the image as Angela does. The surface is so slick and juicy like glass or hard candy. I am picturing it being printed on high gloss paper…I also enjoy not knowing much about the technique of photography and just enjoying looking at it in my “ignorance.”
Did you do anything to manipulate the color?
Leslie,
I am uncertain about the history of the 2004 photo. Not having found its raw file, I must still have taken it in jpeg and then converted it into tif. This means that I did not do any raw file processing in Adobe Photoshop. I am not even sure whether I did a ‘level’ adjustment to the whole photo before having it printed for my mother who is fanatical about water. Just now, before putting the photo on the web, I did a small level adjustment to the center of the wave to lighten the turquoise color so that it looks the way I remember it in its live luminosity. Imaging since then in raw file format, I now keep the originals so that I know what processing took place.
Steve, Angela and Leslie,
I appreciate your comments on the aesthetics of the picture. I was afraid using that term because I remember what Rex said about it in his recent post. Being a newcomer to the ‘cerebral’ aspects of art, I still have to learn how to express myself properly.
Birgit, this is a beautiful photo, and I’m struck by how it echoes Paul’s image just below. They’re very different, of course. but something about the combination of the horizontal divisions and the waves makes them go together.
Using the “Levels” feature in P’shop is a good basic way to adjust tonality, but the “Curves” is much better. Takes a bit of practice, but it’s worth it. Two tips are to do it on an “adjustment layer” rather than on the image itself, and to leave the top and bottom corner points (in Curves) where they are, and work with what’s between. That way you won’t be reducing the total dynamic range of the image. You can also add more adjustment layers above it.
I often use “Hue/Saturation” and “Color Balance” layers as well as Curves (unless it’s a b&w image, of course). You can group all the adjustment layers together in a Layer Group to help organize them. And the great thing is that you can always either doubleclick on the adjustment Layer to change the settings, or just turn the layer itself off or change its transparency to reduce the effect. Using Adjustment Layers gives you a lot of flexibility, and it doesn’t alter the underlying image.
As far as expressing yourself properly, I’d suggest just saying whatever you think and not worrying about it. We’re all going to bicker endlessly anyway :)
Birgit,
You’ve already gotten a lot of technical advice from people who are more qualified than me, so good! I can talk about the fun parts, like how the water creates that amazing optical illusion.
When I first looked at this picture, I thought I saw a fish in the wave, but is the the way the water made the sand appear to float up.
There are lovely patterns here. Your eye was true. The moment was the right moment.
And I think what I said about “aesthetics” was that it was a problem word to use in a definition for art.
But it’s not a problem word.
Everyone knows exactly what you mean. You mean it pleases you in the way beauty pleases, and things like elegant math proofs can be aesthetic too.
“The sky is aesthetic.” Sure. Got that.
“The sky is art.” Well, maybe. Or not.