¶Sunset Colors
I had a few hours to spend in the Deception Pass and Oak Harbor area, and sunset was approaching. So I grabbed my camera and took some pictures. The result is a good study of color and saturation. High saturation is normally a real turn-off in photography, but in sunset pictures the landscape frequently is naturally saturated.
This shot directly into the sun really brings out the colors in the sunset. The image is darkened to allow the sky to shine through without clipping highlights. Not my favorite sunset shot, but I like the vivid colors.
The Deception Pass Bridge, taken from the mid-bridge island looking south. Note the sunset’s reddish color on the grass in the foreground — this picture was taken after the shot before it. The blue sky comes from a polarizing filter nearly exactly 90 degrees offset from the sun.
From Deception Pass it took my twenty five minutes to drive to downtown Oak Harbor, where this photograph proves that the sun produces beautiful colors for a long time. The sun may be below the horizon, but the only change I had to make was bumping ISO up to 200 from 80.
One last shot across Oak Harbor towards the marina. Despite the lateness, you can still see some red reflecting off the mountains in the far background.
Final call? Don’t oversaturate your images just to make a okay photograph “pop” more, but don’t be afraid to use saturation where it’s naturally high. None of these images would look as good with lower saturation.
¶Action shots
I admit, I don’t consider action shots to be my forte. It’s something I’m working on, however. If I’m going to call myself a ski photographer, I suppose I actually need to be able to take photos of skiers. Really I just want to ski and take photographs of places you can’t get to on foot…
So here are a few images I took on Friday out on Mount Baker. You’ll notice that none are the typical skier shot. I wasn’t too happy with any of my “traditional” shots in the format that ski photos are supposed to use. This surely has something to do with inexperience with the format, but also quite a bit to do with the number of photos I took. There were a number that we acceptable except for a funny facial expression, or a ski out of position, or some other quirk that just made the run unacceptable. I’m guessing that photographs paid to take pictures of skiers have the models take a lot of runs to get a few good shots. In my case I’m taking landscape photographs, and I agree to take a few of the guys with me as a courtesy.
This is RustyKnees telemarking in front of Mount Shuksan as the sun sets behind him. Probably too dark to be a good print, but I like the imagery. Another shot in the same burst series made for a nice B&W image with a very different feel to it:
I had a lot of shots with good snow spray and rooster tails, but as I mentioned before, there was always something that distracted me from the artful snow. The solution was to take the skier’s face out of the frame:
Hopefully that will keep everyone happy until I can go skiing again. Praise Ullr!
¶Winter is Coming!
With the snow level dropping to 3500’ and below, I had to go out again and ski. I took a few hundred photos, and after picking out just my favorites, I found myself keeping seventy-seven images. That’s a lot, and it’s getting really hard to weed those down. Today I’m going to put up three stills, and later I’ll post a couple of action shots.
I’ve posted the view from Picture Lake before, but I had to include this shot from Friday. A beautiful sunset reflecting off the western face of Mount Shuksan. I like the colors, and the picture is my new boot-up screen for my laptop.
This is a view of one of my companions hiking back up after skiing down a run I call Goat Throat, after the number of Goat’s I’ve seen there in the past. None this weekend, although we did see some tracks. I like the difficulty in determining the subject of the photo… Is it a picture of a skier, or a picture of his tracks? It’s a picture that really tells a story.
The last photograph for today is a wide-angle shot of the same skier looking out from Artist’s Point. He didn’t even realize I was taking pictures at the time, although later he spotted me and made some really unnatural poses. Frequently the best shots are the ones done without the subject’s knowledge, as is the case here.
With any luck I’ll get some more pictures from this weekend posted tomorrow or Monday. With the upcoming winter, I expect to have trouble keeping up with all the great photographs I take in the mountains.
¶Sepia Toning
I’ve just returned from a trip, in which I’d planned to take a bunch of photos. Unfortunately, the weather didn’t cooperate, and I really wasn’t happy with the results. I did get a good indoor picture of a friend of mine drinking in a bar:
I think it’s good to mention that there is more than one way to sepia tone an image. Using a sepia plugin or filter generally isn’t the best way to go about it. Personally, I like this tutorial at Gimpguru, but your mileage may vary.
I was so happy with the results (the low-res version on the Internet doesn’t do it justice), so I used the same technique on a photo I posted here recently. Here’s the result, which I find warmer and more personable:
