Looking For Light On The Road, Again

Looking For Light On The Road, Again

by William Lulow

Note: The next few blogs posts will be mostly images from my working/vacation time in Florida.

Here are some mundane images that have been improved with some interesting compositions and a little post-production work. Looking for light on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina:

Many times, when I am traveling, I look for scenes that have the potential to be inspiring. I am looking for a lighting, or landscape that may not be what I would like it to be at the moment, but at least give me the idea that they can be enhanced by some post-production work. These are, by no means, finished images, but they all contain elements that can be kind of coaxed out of their current existences, so to speak. There may be clouds, or reflections or blue skies or just something that might be of interest.

First, I like to play around with exposure. I try to get a good one to begin with, then underexpose a frame or two and maybe try to get a bit more detail in the shadow areas so that I can play with it later. Sometimes, I am thinking about taking an element from one exposure and combining it with another to produce a much more intense image.

Some of the post-production work I do uses tools in Photoshop like “Vibrance & Saturation” or “Hue & Saturation” or even just controlling contrast in one area using the “Quick Selection” tool and selecting the inverse of it to isolate the rest of the image to make changes.

I am actually thinking about all of this when I actually make the image. Often, I set my ISO a bit higher than my normal setting of 100, so that I have a bit more leeway with depth-of-field. The marshland shot above will need more work on the sky portion in order to bring out more detail. Or, with the top shot of people on the beach, I may decide to remove some of them and just leave one couple, which I have done before.

These are things that I am thinking about when I make an image that has some appeal at the outset. Then I know it can be refined later.

Here are a couple I made at Atlanta’s High Museum on my way to Florida:

An image of adjacent buildings through a window in the museum,

a high-angle interior shot with some interesting compositions, and:

an interior/exterior shot which was light balanced later in Photoshop. As I mentioned in a previous article, if I was doing this as a professional assignment, I would have placed lights for the interior and balanced them with the exposure for the outdoors. Sometimes it can be easier to do this with retouching.

And a self-portrait made as a reflection in a piece of art hanging on the museum wall:

A couple of snapshots on St. Armand’s Circle, St. Armand’s Key, Florida:

Outside the famous Columbia Restaurant:

Not every image is a gem, but we always have to keep looking!