Before and After | Alex Wise Photography

Posted on March 9, 2015March 9, 2015 by Alex Wise

Before and After – Wye River

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Photographing star trails is something that is forever on my to do list. I’ve photographed countless sunrise and sunsets over the years but star trails continue to elude me. On a trip down the Great Ocean Road for a few days, I was determined to pick a night and setup for some star trails. My intention was to find a reasonable composition, a rock to sit on, load my tablet up with an episode of The Newsroom (great show I might add) and sat back while the camera did the rest.

Taking the Photos

Luckily conditions were perfect for star trails with the sky being clear and the moon relatively new. When photographing star trails, those much smarter than I suggest it is better to time your star trail photography around the time of the new moon. This results in less light emitted by the moon allowing for a darker sky. Another thing that has to be considered when doing star trail photography is light pollution. This can be a real issue if you live in bigger cities. I’m from Melbourne, Australia, often we will drive 100km ~ from the city, and still struggle some light pollution that leaves some light visible in the sky. This does not make photographing stars impossible but is something to consider if you do live in a bigger city. Fortunately, for this trip, we were headed far from Melbourne with minimal light pollution so it was clear and very dark skies. This led to some great conditions for star trails even if I still got some noise pollution through an orange glow from Geelong in the left of the frame.

One thing that has always acted as a deterrent for star trail photography is sitting around in the dark for hours on end while your camera exposes the earth moving on its natural axis (thanks wiki!). This time around I decided to come a bit better pre-planned and loaded up my tablet with episodes of The Newsroom and made myself at home while my camera exposed for 2 hours. I must admit, I love being in nature on my own but not so much when it’s pitch black dark. Let’s just say – I was happy when the exposure was over so I could get home and jump into a warm bed 😉

Using the pilons as my key composition, I arrived at the location around sunset with the intention of taking a photo on blue hour to capture an image while there was still a lot of light in the scene. The idea here was to get a good dynamic range shot of the pilons in case later during the night, it got too dark and difficult to get a good exposure.

Rather than capture one 80 minute long exposure I decided to take 8 x 10 minute exposures to minimise noise in my image. Unfortunately the 5D Mark II isn’t fantastic in the dark when it comes to noise so opting to blend exposures is a nifty and cheeky way of avoiding this. The end result was 8 x 10 minute exposures at F/5 and ISO 100. This was made possible by using an intervalometer where I specified the exposure time, interval between photos and how many photos I was taking. Other than occasionally glancing at the LCD screen to see how the exposures were looking, I then sat back and enjoyed an episode of The Newsroom until the camera finished doing its thing.

Post Processing the Photos

Blending multiple star trail photos is made easy through the Lighten layer mode in Photoshop. I simply loaded my blue hour image up and then added the 8 images as layers. With these open, I changed the layer mode to Lighten which then combined the star trails and created some nice lines. In case you’re still a little bit still confused I’ve put together a quick clip which demonstrates the process. It’s really that easy.

With the images blended I then went about post processing which I’ve put together into a headache inducing timelapse video. You might notice that I do a lot of flicking back and forward during the video? This isn’t the original edit of the photo and I’m simply checking back to the original during the edit to check how my edit fared in comparison to the original edit.

Through the mad scramble of the above clip I made the following changes:

Combined all images using the Lighten layer mode
Straighten of image with left over back bars fixed up using the content aware tool. I must profess – I’m a sucker for the content aware tool especially when replacing areas that are quite simple like a mark on a blue sky (more on Adobe’s website about content aware). As the black bars were appearing next to blue sky I used the content aware tool to fill in the areas and it didn’t let me down. Although with that being said, it can be a bit temperamental occasionally and force me to not be lazy 😉
Removal of torch light trail. I was shooting with Jon Sander who was off shooting at another location and decided to come back to see how it was going. After sitting in the dark on my own for an hour, I must admit, I wasn’t really expecting visitors and got quite the fright. As he entered the scene, his torch left a light trail which was removed using the content aware tool
Curves layer for the sky to brighten the sky up and emphasize the stars
Curves layer for the ground by pumping up the shadows and bringing as much detail as possible
Subtle hue and saturation change to the sky
Selective brightening of the pilons using the dodge tool
Silver Efex Pro Contrast adjustment layer at a mid opacity to introduce a dynamic contrast to the image

Below shows the final image with the layers combined and edits made. In hindsight I I should have stayed around for another hour but after being up for sunrise, shooting all day and sunset, I was wrecked and ready for a warm bed.

The final image - Star trails at Wye River. More photos from this trip can be seen in my Great Ocean Road post. — The final image – Star trails at Wye River. More photos from this trip can be seen in my Great Ocean Road post

Hope you enjoyed this post in my Before and After series.

Cheers,

– Alex

Posted on March 1, 2015March 1, 2015 by Alex Wise — 4 Comments

Before and After – Liffey Falls

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As a photographer, we all have one or two images that are personal favourites. For me, this is mine. It’s a photo captured at Liffey Falls, Tasmania on a wet and wintery day.

Generally personal favourites for me are images that have back stories that make them what they are. Before taking this photograph I had spent 4 days driving around the Tasmanian West Coast in constant torrential rain without much opportunity to get the photos I’d hoped for. Sure it was beautiful walking along those empty beaches in the pouring rain and exploring the quiet towns of the West Coast but at the same time disappointing not to be able to photograph it in all its glory. Feeling a bit tired and over it all, I decided to make a last ditch attempt for some photos at Liffey Falls even if it was pouring with rain.

Taking the Photograph

The rain over the trip seemed relentless and upon arriving it was still constant even through the towering trees. Luckily for this photo I managed to find a nice little spot underneath a large rock slightly covered from the downpour. Being close to the waterfall created its own challenges with water from the waterfall creating a constant spray over my lens. I couldn’t escape the rain! But eventually after taking a photo, wiping the lens and repeating, I eventually got something without water spray all over the image. It was nice walking away from driving around 1200km over 4 days to walk away with one image I was happy with. Regardless thoughI would have probably been happy with nothing. Exploring the Tasmanian West Coast is a joy in itself. Such a beautiful part of the world. In case you’re interested, photos from this trip to the Tasmanian West Coast can be found in a previous post.

The image was captured with a Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 17-40, manfrotto tripod and Hoya Circular Polariser with a 1 second exposure at f/18. Generally I’ll try to shoot a waterfall for a little longer but due to the constant spray from the waterfall I had to settle with a shorter exposure to get a photo without spray all over the lens.

[box]Interested to learn more about photographing waterfalls? Read my how to on photographing waterfalls here[/box]

Post Processing the Photograph

With the amount of spray coming off the waterfall it made the shoot quite the shoot and dash affair. With this in mind, I deliberately shot the image a little under exposed with the intention of pulling back detail in post. Generally shooting slightly under exposed is a good rule of thumb as it offers you a lot of flexibility in post as you are able to recover detail. Shooting over exposed and trying to recover detail is another story and not generally recommended.

Blending two exposures

With the image shot under exposed, I went about loading the image into Lightroom and exporting two images from the RAW. One at the normal exposure that the photo was shot at and another over exposed at +1.52.

The two images used for blending in Photoshop. One at a neutral exposure and another 1.52 stops over exposed — The two images used for blending in Photoshop. One at a neutral exposure and another +1.52 stops over exposed

The intention here was to use the over exposed image (+1.52) to bring out detail in areas that were quite dark in the original exposure in particular the foliage areas around the waterfall. Combining parts of the over exposed/second image was through the use of layer masks. I’ve written about the layer mask technique previously and funnily enough, the example image in the post is this photo from Liffey Falls so I’ll let that post do the talking.

Colour Correcting

The end result of blending the two images was recovering detail around the waterfall that was otherwise lost in the normal exposure. With the foliage recovered, I then went about making shifts to the red, green and blue colour channels via the curves tool.

In case you’re not familiar with the Curves tool, this gives you the ability to make adjustments to the shadows, midtones and highlights of an image. But for those seeking more control, you can select either the Red, Green or Blue channels and specifically just adjust the shadows of that channel of an image. It’s generally my go to when editing an image in terms of colour correction and changes to the dynamic range of an image. For a quick look into the clip be sure to give this little clip about Photoshop Curves I put together. Not too sure what I was thinking in terms of song choice that day…

I wanted to give the foliage a boost to appear more green and vibrant. Using the curves tool, I made some aggressive changes to the green channel and used layer masks to restrict the changes to the foliage area of the image. This was to avoid introducing a strong green colour cast over the water in the image. With the change to the foliage done, I then went about making some subtle changes to the hue and saturation of the water.

Faking a bit of fog…

So this is where I’m potentially going to lose you… I thought when editing the image “Wow, how great would some fog look at the top of the waterfall? There was a little bit of fog from the rain and low hanging cloud but I must be honest – nothing to the effect as seen in the photograph.Ok so hopefully you’re still with me and I haven’t lost you after coming clean about the fog 😉 But in faking the fog it was actually super easy. Using the dodge brush, I used a mixture of dodging the highlights and midtones around the top of the waterfall gradually introducing it to give this effect.

Final Touches

With the image in a state that I was happy with I went about adding the final touches of selectively sharpening parts of the image using layer masks and some dodge/burning to parts of the image. This was the finished product.

As always, feel free to send an email or leave a comment if you have any questions or feedback.

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Thanks for reading,

– Alex

Posted on February 7, 2015January 26, 2015 by Alex Wise — 2 Comments

Before and After – AAMI Park

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Capturing the Photo

Fireworks at AAMI Park as captured in 2011 during a sports game at one of Melbourne’s iconic sports venues.

After passing by it on my commute every day to work, I’d always wanted to capture a long exposure of the traffic going beneath the bridge with the stadium all lit up with a game being on. Timing for this photo was key where I wanted it to be a clear forecast so I could get a nice blue sky around blue hour. I waited a few weekends where an event would be on but the forecast wasn’t really on my side. Eventually I got lucky with the forecast and luckily there was a time playing so decided to pounce. The plan was to arrive just on sunset to setup and capture an image around blue hour which would provide a nice even light over the scene and allow me to capture the lines from the constant flowing traffic beneath.

It was by luck that AAMI Park uses fireworks for when a team scores a goal. Even more lucky was that many a goals were being scored. I have to be honest – photographing fireworks isn’t my strong point and I really wanted to capture it in one image rather than blending the fireworks into the shot. Thanks to the fireworks going off every 5-10 minutes it let me get the right photo eventually in a 20 second exposure at F/13. For this photo I used the Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 17-40 and a tripod.

Processing the Image

The challenge for this photo (and something I find a lot when shooting night time) is battling the warm temperatures of the street lights. For this image, I could of edited it entirely in Lightroom by using the adjustment brush and saturation but I wanted a greater level of control over the image where I could make small-scale changes to a small selection without affecting the overall image.This is where I encourage the use of layer masks in Photoshop due to their ability to allow you to make selective changes to an image. Want to increase the saturation of just the reds of the traffic flowing past without increasing the saturation to other reds in your image? Layer masks is your answer.

[box type=”info” style=”rounded”]More information about layer masks and blending can be found in an earlier post about layer masks on my blog[/box]

Using layer masks on the bottom half of the image, I used a mixture of selective saturation changes, curves channel changes (adjusting the Red channel shadows and mid tones to reduce the red) and introducing a cold photo filter . I’m probably not 100% with the bottom half of the image but much prefer it over the original image where the lights create a high temperature over the scene.

With the high temperature traffic lights cooled down I then went about editing the sky and stadium. The changes here were quite simple and included:

Saturation boost and brightening the sky – With the intention of capturing the image on blue hour I really wanted to bring out the sky to emphasize the blue hour feel. The sky in the raw was quite flat (notice how the light drops off near the stadium lights) so I used the dodge feature in Photoshop to brighten the sky and to also bring out the fireworks more. With this done I then set about boosting the blues of the sky with a saturation mask
Colour correcting and brightening the stadium – As I had the camera set to auto white balance, this left a warm and inconsistent colour temperature across the whole scene. To correct this, I set about creating a curves layer, opening the red channel and reducing the reds in the shadows and mid tones. The key here was to remove the reds from the stadium to make it appear its natural white colour. In addition to this, a saturation layer was created to lower the saturation of the stadium. Once again, a layer mask was used here for both layers to ensure the reduction to the red channel and saturation was only made to the stadium and not other parts to the scene. Once this was completed, I then went about dodging the stadium to brighten it
Straighten and perspective correction – I must admit, it’s rare that I’ll get my horizons 100% straight. Luckily it’s easy to quickly fix in Adobe Photoshop by selecting the ruler tool, running it along the horizon of the image and then selecting Image > Image Rotation > Arbitrary. With this complete I also used the lens correction tool in Photoshop which corrects distortion based on your lens profile. This can be found in Filter > Lens Correction

And that’s it really. For this image the most important thing was getting as much correct in camera as possible. Sure the colour balance could have been set to manual to avoid having to re-correct in post but through getting the fireworks and everything in one shot made post processing a lot easier.

Hope this post was useful for you and as usual if you have any questions or feedback I’d always love to hear from you.

Thanks for reading,

– Alex

Posted on January 24, 2015 by Alex Wise — 2 Comments

Before and After – St Helen’s Self Portrait

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Before and After – St Helen’s Self Portrait

This is quite an old photo taken back in December 2010 at one of my favourite places in Tasmania, St Helens. A place I spent a lot of time as a kid and close to the beautiful Bay of Fires. St Helens is a beautiful part of the state and if you’re ever visiting, I’d put it high up in the list of places to go. It has some beautiful waterfalls, seascapes and is just a great little town.

This photograph was edited using just Adobe Lightroom. Occasionally I’ll edit 70% of my image in Lightroom and then do some remaining changes (curves, colour correction and sharpening) in Photoshop but for this image it was all Lightroom. I really love how far Lightroom has come. Originally when it was first released I was reluctant but it has made so much progress in recent years and reduces Photoshop from my workflow less and less as new releases come about. I’m excited by what is yet to come.

Capturing the Image

The photo was captured during the day with a 50 second exposure at F/8 using a Canon 5d Mark II, Canon 17-40, Cokin Z-Pro graduated neutral density filter, B+W 110 ND, tripod and control. In case you’re not familiar with day time long exposures, I’ve got a small post on my blog about daytime long exposures which goes into detail on how it works and the equipment needed. I love the way long exposures can transform a scene by smoothening the water or clouds of a scene.

For this image, I used a neutral density filter and graduated neutral density filter (for the sky) to smoothen the water and clouds to give a minimalist feel.The clouds were quite patchy and thanks to the wind, I was able to use the long exposure to subtly blur them and give them this look.

Post Processing

Split toning settings used for this image

Post processing this image was heavily geared around playing with the split toning feature of Adobe Lightroom to introduce a cold feel to the image. I went into quite a bit of detail in an earlier post about Lightroom’s Split Toning which may be of interest to those not familiar with it. Through using the split toning feature, you are able to introduce a tone to either your shadows or highlights. It’s really handy and I’ll often use it to add a subtle hint of a colour to either my shadows or highlights. Often I’ll add a very subtle yellow/orange to my highlights to give a warmer feel to the image.

Once the split toning was applied, I made some subtle adjustments to curves, boosting the shadows ever slightly, adjusting the saturation and clarity of the image.

And that is how my self portrait at St Helen’s was captured and post processed. I hope this post was useful 🙂

As always If you have any questions or comments feel free to leave a comment or drop an email. Always happy to help or chat 🙂

– Alex

Posted on November 17, 2014April 4, 2015 by Alex Wise — 4 Comments

Before and After – Secret Falls, Tasmania

Secret Falls has been on my to photo list for some time after visiting it a few years ago with a friend when bushwalking through the area sans camera. It’s a beautiful little waterfall that does live up to its name even if the location isn’t really quite a secret if the amount of people photographing it is anything to go by…

The location of Secret Falls is a ‘secret’ and probably best not published here but I’m happy to disclose if you drop me an email.

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Taking the photograph

Based on the popularity and small size of the waterfall it made things especially difficult to get a unique take on the waterfall. Something as photographers, we are forever striving for, to get our own unique capture of a scene. With this in mind, I decided to get a bit wet and assemble some rocks in the middle of the foreground with the intention of capturing a long exposure that would blur the water as it passed the rocks. Are moving rocks around in a scene to create a composition cheating and take away the authenticity of a scene? I’d argue no but would be interested to hear if others feel otherwise.

With the scene setup, I set up my gear (Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 24-70, Hoya circular polariser and manfrotto tripod) and began taking some test shots of the scene. It’s interesting, a friend and I were having a discussion recently about focus stacking and the notion of using multiple photographs at varying focus levels to maximize the sharpness of an image. I laughed it off and said it would be rare for me to ever need to do this but what do you know, a week later, I was putting the theory into practice swallowing my naysaying words and using the technique for this shot. The reason I opted to focus stack this image was the difficulty in having both the foreground and background rocks sharp. Generally, shooting wide with an ultra wide angle lens and high depth of field (f/11 onwards) it’s rare to run into this issue but by using the 24-70 which isn’t quite as wide my normal go to lens, the Canon 17-40, it was difficult to get the whole scene in focus.

Focus Stacking

Focus stacking works under the same principal as exposure blending in which your camera is set up on a tripod and you take various exposures or in this case, different focus levels which is then selectively combined into the final image. For this image of Secret Falls, I took a reading in aperture priority mode and got a reading at f/13. This gave me an exposure time of 25 seconds. I changed the camera to manual mode and dialed in f/13 and 25 seconds. The reason for changing to manual mode is to avoid any variation in exposure that aperture priority may have introduced. With the camera set in manual mode, I focused the image on the foreground rocks and then took another image with the focus selected on the background. This left me with two images that I would then need to blend in Photoshop.

Processing the Images

Getting the photo as right as much as you can when taking the photo makes post processing the image far more easier. By using a circular polariser when capturing the photos, this increased the saturation slightly, reduced glare on the water and allowed me to get a longer exposure time. With the two images captured loaded in Photoshop (one with the background in focus and another of the rock in focus) I loaded both images into Photoshop and made the following changes.

Focus stacking – As mentioned above, two images were taken for the purpose of focus stacking, one for the rock in the foreground and another for the foliage in the background. Using layer blending, I used the background (foliage focus) image as my primary image and then introduced the second frame (focus of the rock) into the shot through layer masks
Curves layers – Using a combination of curves and layer masks has become my go to for selective colour grading and brightness/contrast changes to an image. As an example from this image, I selected the green channel and bumped the shadows of the image to really bring out the green around the waterfall. This introduced a strong green colour cast to the whole image, which was mitigated through using layer masks and isolating the strong green to only being present in the foliage area around the waterfall. Similar changes to the image were made to the blue channel to bring out the blues of the waterfall and also to make selective dynamic range increases to the image
Saturation and hue – When making changes to saturation, I rarely make changes to the saturation as a whole and prefer to make changes to individual colours for greater control over the image. For this image, I was particularly keen to play with the greens and reds saturation and hues until I got the desired effect I was after. The idea was to give the water a warmer feel around the rocks and give the greens a stronger hue
Spot removal – Don’t laugh or cringe but I’ve become a sucker for the content aware tool that was introduced a few revisions ago in Photoshop. Selecting the area where a spot had got on my lens from the rain, I filled the area with the content aware tool and it worked a treat
Resize and sharpen for web – Finally I resized the image to 900px/72 dpi at the longest edge and used the unsharpen mask (USM) tool to sharpen the image. Once again, I like to use layer masks when sharpening an image as it allows me to be selective in my sharpness adjustments to a scene. With some minor sharpness adjustments through layer masks the image was complete

Processing this image was fun. It’s always nice to put a new technique like focus stacking into play to see how it works and can benefit an image.

Where is Secret Falls?

Update – I’ve decided to add this section after receiving regular emails asking for the location of Secret Falls. When originally writing this article I was questioning whether to include the location of Secret Falls or not. For me, not disclosing the location had nothing to do with keeping the whereabouts of this small waterfall an enigma but more to do with the environmental impact which disclosing may create. For this reason, when accessing Secret Falls be mindful of the impact you have and follow an existing path rather than creating a new. Potentially this will ruffle feathers with some but this location has been known for years and should be shared for others to enjoy.

Google Maps screenshot of the route to Secret Falls. Click for larger.

The location of Secret Falls is conveniently located near the CBD of Hobart just up from the Cascade Brewery. The location of Secret Falls is at the end of Old Farm Road which you enter via Cascade Road. The drive from Cascade Road to the end of Old Farm Road takes roughly 5 minutes and will eventually lead you to a carpark which I believe for memory is the Old Farm Fire Junction. Walk towards the Junction and you will have 3-4 bushwalks going in varying directions. When I first visited Secret Falls with a friend, we had no idea which path to take and walked most of them in the search of Secret Falls. It was quite tragic but was a nice afternoon out. So to avoid our mistakes, avoid taking the far left or far right tracks. These will not take you to Secret Falls.

The location of Secret Falls is along the Myrtle Gully Falls track and roughly 100m from the Myrtle Gully waterfall itself. Unfortunately it’s difficult to be specific on the exact location of Secret Falls as it is well hidden by undergrowth and deep gully however the best indication is to keep an eye out for a track that goes down the embankment created by bushwalkers/photographers when accessing the waterfall. If you’ve made it to Myrtle Gully Falls, you have gone too far and need to retrace your steps back a little. As said earlier in the post, please be respectful of the environment as you are making your way to the waterfall and follow the path that others have created rather than creating your own.

Thanks for reading and if you have any questions feel free to drop a comment or email as I’d be happy to help further.

– Alex