Doug's Photos

Welcome Students!

Quechee Gorge
Canon 5D MII | 1/160sec at f/6.3, ISO 100 | 17mm (EF 17-40 f/4L USM)

This image was shot off the bridge overlooking the gorge in the middle of the afternoon on 10/3/2013. I input my RAW image into Lightroom 5 and saturated the images colors. I find that most images need a little extra "punch" when shot in RAW mode due to the camera capturing a larger dynamic range and trying to display as much of that information as possible. I did digital dodging-and-burning but no other retouching was done. The composition of this image is as shot with no cropping done. The entire image is shown as I composed it in the camera.

If you care to comment or ask questions about this image please do so.

Douglas K. Hill

Nurse and Patient

1/60 sec @ f/8, ISO 1250 | 28mm(EF28mm-70mm f/2.8L USM)

After our class discussion on lighting, I wanted to share the results with you of using some of the ideas that I shared with you.

This is a shot in which I had florescent room lighting and just a little daylight through the blinds already. I used my flash attached to the bracket on my camera, but if I had used it directly on the camera it could have looked identical. The flash was angled to the left at about 45º and up around the same angle with the diffuser over the flash and the bounce card extended. You can see that I set up the second flash behind my subject on the left from slightly above her and about 5 feet away. The ration was a little stronger on that flash, somewhere around a 1:3 ratio. That ended up being a bit bright, so I corrected it in post production.

During the retouching, the background was darkened and blurred to give more attention to the faces of our subjects. I also lightened the face of the nurse and darkened the back of the patients head around the pillow in order to give it more shape. Finally, I added some color saturation and cropped the image.

All of this was done in Lightroom.

The original shot looked like this...

Student

1/60 sec at f/2.8, ISO 400 | 70mm (EF 28mm-70mm f/2.8L USM)

Hi class! You may remember us taking this photo. This is the one where we added the on-camera flash and I had my "assistant" hold a reflector up under the face of our "model" just out of site of the camera. The original shot looked like this...

 

I wasn't so fond of the lighting or the lack of a background, so I did some retouching. I used a few techniques to pump up the highlights, give the image some depth with shadows and color, and used masks to change the background. If you would like to know more about the retouching end of things let me know. Maybe we can use some of our time in class to work on our images!

Boats on Water | Eastman

iPhone photo | manual exposure with HDR

This is a photo taken when I was at the lake and I had not brought my camera with me. Not wanting to miss the opportunity, I shot this photo with the equipment I had on hand, my iPhone. 

One thing that the iPhone does that was useful in this situation is capture an HDR image. This High Dynamic Resolution allows the camera to record a shot with an extended range of detail from highlights to shadows. Then it compresses those values into an image that represents what your eye sees, but with a lessened contrast so the camera can show more what your brain does automatically—blend those light and dark areas together into one image. I can reproduce HDR images using other methods and other cameras just as well. 

My point is this, don't let your equipment limit your creativity. Shoot with what you have available to you and plan your images using that as a starting point. As your able to obtain more photo gear, your ability to get your results will become a little easier!