Lighting Matters
I often get asked how much altering I do to my photos within Photoshop due to the high contrast and saturated colors in my photos. I’m somewhat of a purist when it comes to the editing of photos so I do very little to my photos in Photoshop aside from slight adjustments to contrast, saturation and sharpening – all things that were commonly done within film darkrooms. The keys to the nice colors and contrast within photos really boil down to two things: lighting and the use of a polarizing filter to reduce glare. I’m not going to address polarizing filters in this post but wanted to leave a quick note about lighting. Landscape lighting is best in the soft light of morning or evening. Light at those times has a warmer glow to it (technically it is a cooler temperature light but I’ll save that for a future post) and lights objects from the side, exposing textures and increasing meaningful contrast. As I have worked to improve my photography I have become somewhat of a lighting bigot and don’t even think it worth shooting if I can’t get good lighting and dramatic skies in my photos. Of course, that means I take fewer photos [...]
Difference Between Pretty Scenes and Good Photographs
June 4, 2009 by Cody · Leave a Comment
Good photographs are difficult to come by. Pretty scenery, at least in Utah, is much easier to find. What’s the difference, you might ask? In my opinion, it boils down to a few items: Good composition Excellent lighting Vibrant colors Strong contrast My family and I recently took a trip down to the Provo River area to play in the river and scout some photo locations. I’ll use a couple of photographs I took while down there (pretty scenery but not good photos) to illustrate the difference between a pretty scene and a good photograph. Here are the photos. This first photograph of the mountains near the Sundance Ski Resort has some elements of a successful composition but is missing some key elements that would make it a good photograph. It has nice lines running from right to left in the contours of the grass and has a dramatic sky, something that is often times difficult to capture, but, due to the angle at which I took this photo, as well as the wide angle lens used, the mountains are far less imposing than they are in real life. In real life, they are rugged and imposing but this photo doesn’t do them justice. Another [...]
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