Hi I'm Janine from Pangolin Photo Safaris and I'm with you on the Chobe River
Today I'm going to explain to you how to photograph dark subjects against
a bright background such as the sky.
Over here we have a beautiful Southern Carmine Bee-Eaters however it's now
ten o'clock in the morning and the light has gotten quite harsh and he looks very
silhouetted and dark against the very bright sky. So if we actually want to see
his red color and not just a black bird we're going to have to over-expose our shot significantly.
I'm going to go to +4 here all the way up to plus four in
order to try and make his color visible again. He's sitting on that beautiful
reed over there. Therefore we can apply the rule of thirds. He's looking to the
right. I'm going to shift my focus point to the left onto his eyes so the reeds is
at the bottom third and the carmine bee-eaters on the vertical left third of
our picture. That seems to be quite beautifully balanced in the photograph.
There we go. Here you can see our sky is turning perfectly white but we have blue
skies all over the world so we are interested in that very colourful bird
and his red colors really popping nicely in front of the wide sky.
You can't easily do action shots this way because we're asking for so much extra light
that our shutter speed, our aperture in our ISO is working hard to get us
this extra light. If we now would want 1/4000 of a second to catch him
in flight aswell we would block out too much light. So I'm bringing my
shutter speed down to about a 1/1000 of a second. I can't go much lower with
my long lens in order to ensure that we get enough light into our camera for
this high key image
Hi I'm Janine and I'm with Pangolin Photo Safaris in the editing room of the
Pangolin Chobe Hotel today. Earlier on we've been photographing a carmine
bee-eater rather challenging light conditions together and now I quickly
downloaded the photograph for you so we can have a look together how we can
work on it in post-production.
Let's get started. Alright these are all the
photographs I've taken of the carmine bee-eater while I was trying to explain
to you the high key concept on a colourful picture. You see there's quite
a lot of photographs and a lot of people ask me how do you make the choice of of
your best picture afterwards how do you know which one to delete and which one
you don't want it to delete. Well it's quite easy because you want to be rather
strict with yourself you want to figure out which is the best photograph.
You want to have the bird looking towards you. Ideally you want to have everything in
your frame. Maybe you want to have a little bit of space to crop.
So this photograph for instance I would know from the start I could delete.
He' not even looking towards us. Once you've found your ideal photograph
you just delete the rest. There is no point in making yourself unsure
about what you want to do, if you already found the best in there.
Here you see you have the carmine bee-eater he still has a little bit of shadow on his
back on that beautiful green Reed of ours. It's always important if you press "i"
you get the information on Lightroom to have a quick look at your settings.
It will teach you a lot about what you did maybe right or wrong.
I was on 1/2000s because the read was also swaying in the wind and a low f-stop
for a nice portrait. Background doesn't need to be blurred because it's into the sky.
But I'm trying to collect as much light as possible here. If you remember correctly
we were over exposing quite significantly around +4 and that means
that our ISO is shooting up high to provide us with enough light to get +4
of light into our screen so our ISO hit 3200 and that means
in post-production we're gonna have to keep
an eye on the grain in our photograph.
let's go to develop mode.
I first want to crop it a little bit.
I was saying in the movie that I would like the reed to be
roughly at the bottom third. Obviously we really don't want to crop
that little tail off here. That tail is part of the bird so maybe we can't reach
a full 1/3. Also the reed is bent maybe where it exits and enters the screen, left and right,
it can hit roughly 1/3. We want to have the bird sitting
on the left vertical third here. We always say very significant features such
as that eye look very good if they lie on the cross points of the horizontal and
vertical lines of thirds. So this could work quite well. Naturally I'm going to
shift them a little bit more to the left actually. I work a lot according to my my
belly feeling and then I'm going to start with our basic settings here.
Having a look at our histogram shows us that our histogram is way off whack.
We're doing a high key photograph so it is running off to the right hand side
showing us a lot of blown-out areas. All this white around in the background
should be blown out that was the goal. In the basic settings I'm trying to get my
exposure right. Obviously yes we want to have the whites as white as possible but
as I said the backside of the bird is still a bit shady.
We want to pull those shadows out a little bit.
So let's see that we get the whites as white as possible without losing
contrast in our bird and putting the whites even wider I'm gonna try and pull
the shadows out of the bird. It looks very pale and yucky now.
So in turn I'm gonna bring some of the highlights back in to give them a little
bit of structure and actually bring the entire
exposure down enough so that the red bird doesn't look pale in our frame.
By pulling the blacks to the left a little bit it's now fine balance between
pulling the shadows out and not losing our contrast. So you see I'm balancing
between pulling making my blacks stronger and pulling my shadows out of the bird.
Here we go. If we look into the bird you see the grain quite hectically.
There's nothing you can do about it at that stage. If I would pull my clarity to
intensify the looks of the bird the grain will increase even more.
So Im going to be very careful with that.
I was shooting as a raw image - it's a .cr2 file
and therefore I'm gonna have to sharpen my image as well.
With sharpening you have the same problem as with clarity
If you have a very noisy image to start with
you see if I sharpen it now here on the right hand side the
grain and the noise becomes quite intrusive so be very careful with
sharpening a high ISO image. Something that could help you is to mask your
image. Masking means that you do not sharpen the entire surface area of your
image but you only take the most contrasty feature, the outlines of the image.
I press my ALT button and therefore I can see which areas I sharpen.
All the white bits in my frame are being sharpened and you'll see
it as only the outline. If I sharpen only the outline the rest will not struggle so much with noise.
You know I can pull my sharpness even a bit further. There we go.
Between trying to get your exposure and
the bird right and sharpening your image that's pretty much all you need to do with
this photograph and if you find the green colours and the reeds are
a little bit too fake. You can adjust your colours individually within your
HSL/Colour column. I'm going to go to the green and I'm gonna
play with the luminance of my green color to make it less lime green and a
little bit more saturated green. However I'll take a little bit of that
saturation out so that that reed is not competing with the colours of my bird.
The bird is after all still the main feature in this photograph. Let's have a look on
full frame there we go a very clean-cut high-key image in colour.
Most high key images look best when they're photo when they're turned into black and white.
After all you really don't want to be losing the red colours of our carmine
bee-eaters so this is one of the few exceptions.
I really hope you enjoyed this and it was helpful to you .If you enjoyed it please
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Thank you very much for listening in.
Bye-bye