Not a prayer
I don’t always travel with a full complement of photo gear. Sometimes I carry just my Canon G9, which you read about yesterday.
On this day, as we walked out of the house, I grabbed a Nikon D300 with the 14-24mm f2.8 lens.I love the wide-angle perspective both for its ability to emphasize foreground objects and the requirement that I get close to a subject to make it larger in the frame. Getting closer means I have to make contact with people, ask them questions, inquire about them and convince them I’m harmless and not intruding on their lives.
I love the 14-24.
The trip was to be a short one, just long enough to drop off a granddaughter at a friend’s house and return home before dark.
Our return trip, was detoured because my wife had never been on the new birdwatching boardwalk at the northern end of the reservoir at Hoover Dam. Walking the 1,000 foot wooden walkway at sunset in spring before mosquitoes appear from the nearby wetlands is a pleasant stroll.
We arrived just as the sun dipped below the tree line on the opposite shore. I shot a few wide-angle panorama style images of the lake horizon with boats and a few small islands. Several frames included the moon, only a few days before its full moon night although they weren’t especially interesting. The moon in a 14-24mm wide angle image is very small. It was also high enough in the sky to only be a point of light reflected in the lake. It would have been different, perhaps, if a just risen moon was reflected across the broad expanse of lake to the horizon.
My wife had her rosary in her purse and I remembered the glass bead being transparent red that would make great color contrast against the blue lake and sky as the sun made a narrow strip of red and orange as it disappeared into night.
After arranging her hands and the rosary into a composition that silhouetted them against the lake and sky, I checked my ISO to make sure it was at 400 to keep noise low. Exposure was determined by aperture priority with 1/2-3rd stop underexposure prevent the sunset highlights from being blown out. I wanted tonal detail and the only way to get it was to underexpose the frame.
I held still through a large number of frames as the shutter speed hovered around 1/4th of a second at the f5 setting I wanted for just a little more than the minimum depth-of-field the f2.8 offered.
A quick check of the histogram and the LCD screen made me confident that I had a workable frame.
The image was processed through Adobe Camera Raw into Photoshop as a RAW Smart Object. The background layer, opened with little ACR processing, was duplicated as a new Smart Object and reprocessed to darken the right side of the frame so the tone matched the darker left section. The new layer was then masked and painted in with a large brush only enough to give me even tones across the width of the frame.
A third duplicated background Smart Object was processed to brighten the glass beads on the rosary. Again, the layer was masked and only the beads brushed in.
The next set of steps can be done by hand or by using actions or plug-ins such as Topaz and OnOne plug-ins that make creating manipulated layers much easier and faster than manual or a series of actions.
This photo was run through a Topaz portrait filter than softened and blurred the complete frame as if it was a studio portrait that required softening for an enhancement. I masked it and only brushed in on everything but the rosary. The darker edge came from an OnOne action.
The completed image was merged into a single layer, duplicated, run through the PS High-Pass filter and masked. Only the red beads were brushed into the frame to make them more crisp and to give the color contrast more emphasis.
Full processing time was about 10 minutes from the original opening of the RAW image in ACR to saving this low-res for uploading to the Web.
The key to the work-flow was to know as I was shooting the photo what processes I was going to use to get the finished image. When I sat down at the computer there was little question what the processing steps would be.
That wasn’t part of the planning process for my brief trip. I let serendipity take me to a different place. The photo I discovered while there was measured until it was completed. A great balance of flow and work-flow.
