In the sugar shack
rutt
Registered Users Posts: 6,511 Major grins
The sap is running and we're making grade A medium at Lands Sake in Weston, MA.
If not now, when?
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You threw me for a loop, I got all excited when I saw your post title. My wife and I stayed in a cute little cabin in the mountains called the Sugar Shack. I thought you had maybe stayed there also and was posting pictures.
Very nice set.
Tim
Speak with sweet words, for you never know when you may have to eat them....
I love how you have two or three different color of light sources (daylight, tungsten, flourescent) and they all look right and seem balanced. Shows how great digital can be when it is done right. Nice series of images, rutt.
Moderator of the Technique Forum and Finishing School on Dgrin
how did you do that rutt ?? i shot in a gym with ??? lighting and never got the color right Jeff
“PHOTOGRAPHY IS THE ‘JAZZ’ FOR THE EYES…”
http://jwear.smugmug.com/
Danny.
In this particular case, I used the eye dropper to white balance on the white board during raw conversion. That's a little risky because it's under the flourescent light and might easily have been too green. But in this case, the board was catching all three light sources in about the right ratios. Also at the time of conversion, I decreased both the shadow and exposure to make sure that no detail was blown on either end. I find it much better to have the detail after conversion and deal with getting the contrast right via curves then.
Once the conversion was made, I used NeatImage because this was shot at 1000 ISO. I used LAB curves to tweak the contrast, get the black points really black, make sure the board and the steam were really neutral, make a white point, make sure the woman's flesh was a plausable color, and make the contrast curve steep where I wanted detail to show most. In this case, that meant the shadows. Finally I used FM sharpening. So it was sort of a lot of steps, but it's like riding a bicycle, once you get used to it, it comes easily without too much thought. (usually)
If you don't have Dan's book, buy it. Almost nobody can read it all at once or absorb everything he says immediately. Typically it takes years. But you can learn a lot right away and with a little work you'll be able to make much better photographs. After that, you can keep learning from this book (and Dan's column) over a lifetime.
I just wanted to point out to the other readers the three different light sources that you handled so well as to make their significance disappear. Nice job on a potentially challenging shot. Good shadow detail retained also.
Moderator of the Technique Forum and Finishing School on Dgrin