Anderson County Lake - Bay Area CA
Stumblebum
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Great weather today in Bay Area, rain, clouds, stormy conditions! What more can a nature photographer ask for?:dunno
If you drive to Henry Coe State park's East-Dunne-Avenue entrance via city of Morgan Hill, you go up the hill and get views of Anderson Lake as freebies. This doesn't require hiking. Below are my attempts that I thought were worth sharing. All feedback is always welcome!
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If you drive to Henry Coe State park's East-Dunne-Avenue entrance via city of Morgan Hill, you go up the hill and get views of Anderson Lake as freebies. This doesn't require hiking. Below are my attempts that I thought were worth sharing. All feedback is always welcome!
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Comments
2 through 6 are good use of incorporating the glare when you have to shoot into the sun, something about them just seems a little bit harsh to me, especially 2,3, and 4, I think it's all the hot spots in the clouds and the shadows. How did you process these?
I like 5 a lot, although not as much as 1 and 7, I like it better with some of the bottom cropped off though.
Thanks Gemma!
Thanks Kolibiri. Great CC as always!
As they say, sometimes it is better to be lucky than good. It was raining hard and I had to slow down considerably while driving. The break in weather, light and the single boat, all arrived at the same time!
I use LR4 only for processing. According to it, there wasn't a single highlight clipping or hot spot. I could have toned it down more.... I was excited about the glare especially in the water.....and tried to get the sun-star as best as I could....I don't have calibrated monitor, so someone else may need sunglasses while viewing them.....
I however now think about it, and if I had cooled some of the spots in #2 (which I was personally rooting for), I would not have lost the other aspects that I liked, mainly how the lake was lit up at that moment and how the light caused the left side of the hill with houses and all to glisten. I also would have not lost anything in terms of semi-silhouette of the tree. Also the overall temp could have been lowered a tick.....all things I will keep in mind next time I am processing picture like this. THANKS!
I love glistening affect and sometimes tend to lean towards 'hot' to preserve it.
As for #3 and #4, not in love with them, but at least on my monitor the tree was glistening perfectly in #3 (hated the fact it was centered), and lake had some glare that I liked. #4 is probably least successful because I didn't have enough zoom to get close to the rays that were coming from the clouds and acting like search light....and couldn't distinguish them enough....and also caught flare.......overall that picture looked much warmer on my monitor.....but now I am using my work monitor and that doesn't appear as great....
Probably should have left them out.....
Learning a lot, so please keep the CC coming!! Thanks!
Not to be pedantic, but saying that "I use LF4" to process the images doesn't actually tell anyone what you did, anymore than me telling you I used GIMP to process one of mine does.
one reason I ask, is that all the hot spots in the sky are uniform across RGB, just shy of 255, say 253, 253, 253, or 252, 252, 252, and it seems a little bit odd.
Are these straight out of the camera? Stretched between min and max? Stretched in RGB in an S-curve, stretched in LAB space, local contrast enhancement, highlight recovery, etc, etc, etc.
For more sun star, I'd have bracketed your shots, one for foreground and gone to an even smaller aperture and less exposure for the sky, and simulated a ND filter in post by combining those shots (manually, not with HDR)
I didn't know you meant processing details....my bad. So I know nothing of layering or any other software for processing besides LR4 which btw doesn't handle layers. As for the question of hot spots, the only term that makes sense to me there is "highlight recovery". Actually slider used to be present in LR3 but now they have broken it up. So I almost always reduce the main highlights anywhere from -60 to -80 (can go upto -100). That along with shadows which I reduce much less brings out the details in highlight areas. The high-light clipping did not flag anything, but looking back at it, I could have brought it down little more as for me the pop areas are below the clouds.
I have not found the local highlight adjustments to be as clean as I feel they leave a blob and can be noticed at least by me. So I try not to do highlight adjustment like that. I should have used a wider brush and calm down larger areas but since clipping didn't flag any, I felt it was ok. I saw enough details and contrast in clouds that I didn't need to pay much attention to it.
I should add that in actual scene there were both very bright and very dark areas and of course I don't want anything dark or over blown and I didn't think that was the case, but I do like to preserve that aspect as to me that is beautiful. Evening everything out was not my goal, but I agree that some areas and over all temp could be cooler. Notice in #2, some point in the lake to left of tree....there is opening in the clouds and light is bursting through causing one spot in the lake to be really lit up and rest of left side to be glittering sort of evenly and same goes for cloud and the hill on the left popped because of that. Not sure if all of that is obvious on other's monitors but on mine it was distinct. That is what drew me to the scene/picture and tried to capture it. If I evened everything out then I would get rid of what I tried to capture.
For me sun star works with small apertures but I still have to find angles where flares is less as every angle is not same. Again since I don't do layering or HDR, every shot I take is single exposure. I sort of mimic HDR by brightening blacks and reducing lights and highlights.
I tried lightroom years ago when they were offering free beta trials, but never moved to the pay version.
when you talk about using a brush, what effect are you applying with it that you refer to?
Just referring to area when I said wider.....so LR4 allows us to zoom in significantly (not at the pixel level that I believe PS allows but still nice zoom) and for a smaller spot, that is what I use, adjusting the brush size per need. However, if you don't zoom in and use wide brush then it won't turn into unnatural blob but large area would take the applied effect more evenly. For example if I wanted I could have circled all of sun and bit more and applied it.
Now I can see that areas where light is bursting through and hitting the ground, they may have passed LR4 highlight-clipping test but could still have used some toning down. Had I noticed it earlier, I would have used large brush (it is circular, and there are 2 concentric circles and the outer one dilutes the effect for better blending and inner one is where maximum effect is applied) and hit that area with either lower highlights or lower exposure.
Next time I would pay attention to it. Thanks for missing nothing! ;o)
I also want to thank you for noting that one can reach this vista without hiking. Hoping to be able to hike more when I recover from knee surgery, but in the meantime....
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