by Ben Willmore | Jan 25, 2014
It seems like everyone really liked my last post where I showed the before and after images from one of my recent lightpaintings, so I thought I’d post another one. A few months ago, I took a private workshop with photographer Harold Ross. Harold has a lightpainting style that I really loved, so I spent two days with him learning how he works his magic. At the end, I came away with not only a slew of new knowledge and techniques but a completed image as well. Harold actually showed my image in a recent blog post that features his students’s work and you can see that HERE.
Below, drag the handle back and forth to see what the scene looked like with ambient light (before) and then the final processed image.
As I’ve mentioned before, if you want to give lightpainting a try for yourself, you can download a free pdf, which is an excerpt from my e-book, that includes everything you need to get the ball rolling. Enjoy!
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by Ben Willmore | Jul 24, 2013
Over the past two weeks, I’ve been posting a lot of images that I shot in Glacier National Park. I thought you all might like to see what the “before” versions looked like before I made my edits. Use the sliders on the images to see the before & after versions.
Enjoy!
* Drag the slider handle to see the before & afters *
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This image was difficult to capture because I had to have my tripod planted right at the centerline of the Going to the Sun road at a skinny spot where nobody could get around me. There was also no shoulder at all on the edge of the road… just a tiny stone wall and then a huge drop off… that meant that I had to keep popping back and forth between the stone wall/ledge to let a car go by and the centerline of the road to get the shot. Using the manual focus tilt/shift 17mm lens made it a more laborious process as well. Finally, the sun was shining directly onto the falls, which made nailing the exposure that much more difficult (I prefer to shoot waterfalls while they’re in the shade).
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This was optimized from a single raw capture. The contrast range is somewhat extreme, which made it essential that I shoot in raw format to capture the most information. There was a real delicate balance in trying to achieve good contrast while retaining shadow detail in the lower portion of the image. It was processed using only Lightroom. If I were to further refine it for printing, then here are a few things I’d do to finish the image: 1) remove tiny glowing edge in the U-shaped area of mountain near the center of the image. A curves adjustment layer and mask would do the job. 2) Darken the dark areas of the mountains on the right half of the image above the large shadowed area that dominates the bottom of the photo. Another curves/mask combo would do it there as well.
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I love when the sun just skims the top of the trees here in Glacier National Park. Underexpose enough and that’s all you’ll get… where the sun kisses the landscape.
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Just another waterfall from Glacier. This is a panorama stitched from five captures. I had to keep the exposure consistent, so I pressed the * button on the back of my Canon 5D Mark III to lock the exposure settings before swinging the camera to make the pano. I shot this 1/4 second exposure at f16 and ISO 50. I’m assuming I had my neutral density filter on the lens, but I don’t know for sure.
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This bus is from the vintage fleet that Glacier National Park uses for public transportation. The most difficult part of this light painting was dealing with all the black areas on the vehicle. Those areas either absorb all the light falling on them and become a black hole, or reflect light of a certain angle back into the camera like a mirror. I had to light the black areas from odd angles to pick up the texture of the material, or light the ground surrounding it to get an interesting reflection. The same is true of the front bumper, which would have come out black had I not strategically lit the ground and other areas to produce a nice reflection to define its shape. It doesn’t really get dark until close to 11pm this time of year in Glacier. That’s why I chose to capture this image in a barn where darkness could be achieved while the sun was still up.
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We took an hour long cruise on Lake McDonald in Glacier National Park in this 1929 wooden boat. I thought an antique treatment was appropriate. This isn’t a “true” before and after image because the color version is a merged panorama where I made pre-merge adjustments. This slider shows the before and after of the vintage effect I applied using OnOne Software’s Perfect Photo Suite 7.
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I love when the sun just skims the top of the trees here in Glacier National Park. Underexpose enough and that’s all you’ll get… where the sun kisses the landscape.
This isn’t a before and after. It’s just a fun gif I made out of two waterfall images.
