Taming the Light

Good landscape images depend on two main factors – an interesting subject and interesting light. One or the other of these may be strong enough to make the picture work, but clearly the best shots are to be had when good subject matter is illuminated by a good quality of light.

The subject is something that can be controlled, after all it's you who are making value judgements about the relative placement of objects, the framing, the image balance and so on. On the other hand, quality of light cannot be controlled directly – nature provides the illumination so you have to work with what you are given.

Natural light might not be controllable but it is at least mostly predicatable. On a sunny day the sun will rise at a precise time and direction, and set at another precise time and direction. During the day it will follow a precise path throught the sky. This means that the timing of the image allows control of the light in an indirect way and a subject that looks ordinary in the morning may well be perfectly illuminated in the afternoon. Colours will tend to be bright but contrast may be a problem.

Cloudy day light is less dependant on the time of day, the sun is diffused by the clouds and soft light with few shadows will be prevalent almost all day. If the subject requires soft light then a cloudy day will be the easiest to work with since the light is of almost the same quality throughout the day. On the other hand, colours will be muted and contrast reduced.

There is no such thing as 'bad' light. There are merely different 'qualities' of light, from harsh sun to soft overcast. Sometime the light can be wrong for the chosen subject but it would be wrong to call this 'bad' light, just 'inappropriate'.

All of this is quite obvious when you think about it but the most important lesson to take from this is that the finest images will always be of strong subjects illuminated by high quality light. Once a subject has been found then it may well be necessary to return to the same place repeatedly to capture the image in 'perfect' light.

Conversely, the most frustrating aspect of landscape photography is when you have limited time and either amazing light but no subject to work with or, vice versa, an amazing subject but the wrong type of light. As a professional photographer I have to come up with strong images whether the light is good or not, and this is possibly the most difficult aspect of the job.

However, being flexible and working with what light you are given, rather than against it, can still yield good images. Let's look at a few images that rely on working closely with the prevailing light conditions.

Whisky Bay – Dull overcast.

Sometimes you have to shoot a place – today. The schedule is pressing and you need to get on to the next spot so there will be no second chance.

Wilsons Promontary in Victoria is a place of great natural beauty and some great light would have made the job so easy. However dull and grey was what nature served up and it was up to me to come up with some decent images.

I had done my usual recce, looking for likely places and had seen these lovely rounded brown granite boulders. The subject was good, the shapes and textures just fine but the featureless grey sky made for a flat colourless image.

My solution was to wait until late in the day when the sky was less bright in relation to the foreground and would record OK on the film. I could not use grad filters due to the uneven skyline and I was shooting film on my Ebony 4x5 camera so a double exposure would have been tricky. I also wanted to generate a bit of drama and decided to use a very long exposure to get the blurred water effect – hence waiting till dusk for the shot.

Given that there were good textures and shapes but only two colours in the scene, brown and grey, I figured this would work well in black and white so it was important to capture all the info in the scene for later scanning and B+W conversion.

The final shot was about 15s @ F22 on Provia100F. I scanned the film on a Flextight scanner ending up with a 275Mb RGB file.

To get the result I had pre-visualised I needed a bit more contrast, not of the overall scene but of the midtones.

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Midtone Contrast Boost Method

1. Duplicate the layer, name it High Pass and set this new layer's blending mode to Overlay or Soft Light.

2. Run the High Pass Filter on this new layer set to about 60px radius (on a large image).

3. Double click the High Pass layer to open the Layer Styles Palette. Here you can limit the effects of this layer to only the midtones using the Blend If sliders as shown in the screenshot. (Hold down the Alt key to split the sliders.)

(Image : 2.png)

4. Adjust the opacity of the High Pass layer visually to get the contrast enhancement you like.

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To finish the image off I burned the sky in a little and dodged some of the highlights on the boulders in the foreground.

Wallace Hut – Dull Overcast

Whilst the previous image was a case of making the most of 'inappropriate' light, this next image was a deliberate choice to shoot in cloudy conditions. Sun amongst trees is very difficult light to shoot with, shadows end up very harsh and the sky can often wash out as well. I wanted to capture all the colours of the Snow Gums, as well as the setting of the hut, so it made sense to wait until the sun had gone behind some thick clouds before shooting this image.

The sky adds nothing to this scene so I framed the image to leave the sky mostly out of the shot. All we are left with are the two most important elements – the hut and the tree.

This image has had very little post production work done, I simply used curves ( or levels, your choice) to boost the midtone brightness and remove a blue cast.

“Dull overcast” then can be a blessing or a curse, all depending on the subject. Beaches, seascapes, wide vistas and cities all become quite hard to shoot under dull skies. Trees, waterfalls and forests on the other hand actually benefit from this light by revealing subtle details in the soft light.

Kimberley Waterfall – Harsh noon light.

Noon sun is not a time I would choose to shoot vista type landscapes, I tend to stick to the more traditional times of morning and afternoon when the light modelling is at its best and the light itself is somewhat warmer in tone. In fact I go to considerable trouble to make sure my evenings and mornings are sped productively whilst on trips. I tend to travel during the middle hours of the day and make sure I am camped by mid afternoon. I then have one evening and one morning to get what I need before moving off to the next spot.

On this particular day I had flown up to this waterfall by helicopter with a group of other people and there was no way to alter the schedule just to suit me, I was there, it was the middle of the day and we would be leaving at 2pm.

The scene was far too good to pass by and in fact it is one of the highlights of this particular trip so I scrambled around the rim of the gorge from where the chopper was parked at the top of the falls looking for a spot where the vista was evenly lit by the sun. I wanted to avoid deep shadows as much as possible. Luckily for me this waterfall faces north so the cliff face gets full sun throughout the day. By circling to the north of the falls I was able to look back south with the sun over my shoulder, resulting in an even light over the scene, without too much contrast for the camera to handle.

Having gone to considerable effort in the 35 degree heat to get to a suitable spot I made sure I shot loads of material. When shooting digital there can be no excuse to not cover everything – panoramas, verticals, closeups etc.

This particular shot is my image of choice from the day and is actually a 7 image panorama shot handheld on a 17mm lens. The coverage is about 180 degrees so, whilst the cliff face is square on to the sun, the left and right extremities are at 90 degrees to the sun and have nice modeling on the details. I used the Photomerge facility in Bridge 2.1 (Tools / Photoshop / Photomerge) to open and blend 7 DNG files automatically. I finished off the image by using the history brush with the blend mode set to 15% Multiply to brush in a contrast boost to the sky but, other than that, this image is pretty much straight out of the camera.

Eagle Bay – Noon sun

This sort of image is where the noon sun is the best type of light for the subject. Clear blue water and white sand show up at their best when the sun is high, whereas in the morning or evening the light will not penetrate the water and relect off the sand. This penetration and reflection is where much of that lovely blue colour comes from. Combined with reflections of the blue sky, this time of day is by far the best to photograph beaches and blue water.

Another good reason for high sun shots is that you can use a polarising filter on a wide lens and not get that obvious dark blue patch in the sky which is so unsightly. When the sun is overhead, any direction will polarise well, making the clouds stand out in the sky by darkening the blue slightly and removing much of the atmospheric haze.

This image is straight out of the camera except for cropping off a bit of the foreground beach which I felt distracted from the overall blue. After scanning this shot normally from 6x12 Provia I used a Photoshop technique invented by Joe Holmes in the USA to clean up the blues and brighten the image without altering the saturation and contrast.

Joe created a set of colourspace profiles based on either film (Ecktachrome) or digital sensors which closely match the visual tonal range of “The Real World” - visually this appears as a slight brightening when first applied. The tricky bit is that once an image is converted to this working space, other profiles can be assigned (not converted to) which alter the interpretation of the RGB numbers without actually changing the values. These profiles are rated as +4, +8, +12... up to +100 and increase the apparent saturation of the image without any of the unpleasant side effects of increasing saturation normally.

This is a complex theory, luckily with simple execution but there is no room to fully go into it here. For full information on this 'secret weapon' visit Joe Holme's website – www.josephholmes.com/profiles.html .

Nick Rains 2008