Bad Light? Try Black and White

September 27, 2016September 27, 2016

This weekend, I photographed a friendly mountain biking event called Broduro. The Broduro is a casual enduro style race between friends “just for fun” featuring with four timed downhill stages. As a photographer, I like shooting enduro because you get to explore different terrain and angles – the action is a bit more exciting and faster paced than xc style mountain bike racing but you generally get the opportunity to shoot the same riders a few times on different trails, unlike downhill where riders race and practice on the same course over and over again.

The not so fun part of shooting enduro is that the lighting isn’t always great. Sometimes it’s pretty horrible actually, and often the gnarliest and coolest features of the course are in areas with the worst light. This course was no exception, with super thick hemlock forests (meaning really dark) in some spots and small areas of direct bright sunlight between sections.

Light like this presents a few problems. The most obvious one is dynamic range and contrast – most cameras aren’t capable of simultaneously capturing details in areas of really dark shadow and really bright light. When you try to fix that in post, using HDR software, blending exposures, or selective editing, you can recover some detail but the images start to get an HDR look about them, which isn’t always desirable. Anything involving multiple exposures is also a huge challenge when it comes to action photography.

The more subtle problem you run into with mixed light has to do with color balance. All light has a color temperature (measured using the Kelvin scale). Areas of shadow and shade have a cooler temperature and appear more blue to the eye whereas areas with bright, natural sunlight look whiter, and some sources of light, such as sunlight early or late in the day, candlelight, campfires, and incandescent light bulbs have a warm, yellow/gold hue. So when photographing a mountain biker riding between areas of sunlight and shadow, you can get some really funky white balance issues. Additionally, some lenses produce artifacts known as chromatic aberration (CA) which appear as a colored fringe around high contrast edges. I see this often in shots of riders wearing a flashy kit or where tree branches appear against an open sky. This phenomenon appears more frequently in photos with high contrast and harsh light.

I sent a colleague of mine some quickly edited photos from the Broduro, including some color images and ones I converted to black and white. He asked “Why do the B&W look so much better?”

The reason is because sometimes the color funkiness from shooting with multiple light sources is really hard to manage, and even when we can’t name what is wrong with the photo, it clearly doesn’t look right. Taking out the color altogether eliminates this subconscious confusion and makes the image easier to accept. My photos from the event also have a bit of noise, because the low natural light forced me to shoot wide open with a pretty high ISO in order to get enough shutter speed to freeze the action. Since we are used to seeing grain in traditional black and white photos, monochromatic luminance noise doesn’t bother us as much as noisy color images, whether we realize it or not. Similarly, we don’t mind black shadows and blown out highlights as much in black and white, because it mimics the look of contrasty film; and muddy whites and faded blacks also are less offensive than because they replicate an antique or aged look. Our tolerance for noise and contrast imperfections in black and white images is much higher because they look similar to what we have seen before in history books and old newspapers. Most of us see our world in color every day, so we expect a higher level of clarity, perfection, and realism from color photography.

Next time you end up with a file that has potential, but you find yourself struggling with harsh, uneven light or balancing the color of light from different light sources, try converting your photo to black and white. Sometimes it beats the effort required to otherwise salvage your photo.

Abstraction Series

August 22, 2015

Today is the first day of the rest of my life. Today I am unemployed for the first time since 2009, when I quit my job to spend a summer biking 4000+ miles across the United States. Before that, I worked all through college and before that, summers in high school. It feels like I’ve never not had a job, and I certainly have never owned a house before and not had a job. The uncertainty of my future is both exciting and terrifying. I can do anything, which is pretty incredible to think about. I can crash and burn, or I can fly.

There’s a song called “Dreams” by Life of Dillon, and there’s a line that goes: “If your dreams don’t scare you, they’re not big enough.” Do you know how many dreams I’ve crammed into this head of mine, and how many of them scare the piss out of me? I guess now is the time to see what I can make of myself and those dreams I have. I only have to pick which one to go after.

I’m a big believer in the goodness of the world and in humanity. I believe that things always work out. I believe you need to take one day at a time. I believe that the things you struggle for and that challenge you are immensely more rewarding than those that come easy. I believe every experience is an opportunity to learn and grow. I believe in the power of people and ideas and hard work.

I am so lucky. So freaking lucky to have a good head on my shoulders and heart in my body. So lucky to have been raised by parents who taught me how to be a good person, how to live on my own and take care of myself. I am lucky to have a mom that supports me and believes in me. I am lucky that I grew up in a town with outstanding public schools, where I received a good education from caring and compassionate teachers, who pushed me, challenged me, and encouraged me, and gave me the tools I need to be successful in life. I am lucky to have incredible friends, who enable me to be the best version of myself possible. I am lucky to have supported myself by doing jobs that I love, that have inspired me and allowed me to build positive relationships and make a difference in my community.

Right now, I’m unemployed, but that doesn’t mean I’m useless or bored or even broke. I am rich with experiences, knowledge, and friendship, and I have plenty of things to keep myself busy while I look for new work. Being unemployed gives me the opportunity to reevaluate where I am and what I am doing and pursue whatever it is that will most bring me joy and fulfillment. So many people working dead end jobs just to make ends meet never get that chance.

So as bummed as I may be to have lost a job I really loved, I’m excited for the opportunity to do something even better. What that is remains to be seen, but there is time to figure that out. 😉

In the meantime, I’m playing with photos again. The series below, called Abstraction, is from a trip in 2013. I was scouting for possible photography workshop locations, and snapped these photos while driving around the backroads in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (disclaimer: I was in the passenger seat, not the one driving). I really like how processing them in black and white allows the feeling of motion to come through, and it captures how being in the woods always makes me feel more free.

As always, you can shoot me an email if you wish to buy prints of any photo (I think Abstraction #4 would look amazing printed on metallic paper or screened on aluminum). Between posting on my blog, website, Facebook page, and stock site, sometimes I don’t always have a quick purchase link readily available, but am happy to work with potential customers on any photo purchase.

Rules are for Breaking

February 26, 2014February 26, 2014

“Well behaved women seldom make history.”

Waterfalls are one of my favorite subjects to photograph. Usually, I prefer to photograph waterfalls on overcast days after rain when the rocks are still wet, as direct sunlight often results in contrast too difficult to capture well in an image and dry rocks often look too bright. On this day while exploring the Great Smoky Mountains, I was very eager to hike to this waterfall, as it had just rained hard for two full days, and I knew the waterfall would be flowing well. When I arrived, the storms had gone and sun had broken through the clouds. Instead of high overcast soft light, I had varied photography conditions as the clouds passed overhead, sometimes blocking the sun but other times letting its rays shine through, illuminating the mist hanging in the air from the waterfall and humid, sweltering landscape. Instead of waiting for the clouds to come between shots, I tried to capture this sparkling, glistening quality when the sun shone just right. As a result, I ended up with this shot, which after some tweaking following nearly 10 months of sitting untouched on my hard drive, is something I rather like. Creativity rarely follows rules, and even though there are a lot of guidelines to techniques that will make you a better photographer, often it is experimentation that results in some of the most unique and exciting images.