Color Photography Assignment: Using Night Photography to Tell a Story

The thin line of light that you see in all of the images are of me running with a lantern during the exposure... All of the shots are from a hill above the homes.


Description:


Choose a location that can only be photographed successfully at night. Shoot 3 images of this location, and aim for one or two portfolio-quality images. All of the shots must be taken between the time that the sun sets and the time it rises. Consider how the changes in light and color that take place at night can be used to tell the story of the place of the state of mind you choose.

Color Photography Assignment: Mixed Lighting

This exposure was ten seconds...  you can see the movement in the trees!

She is in the same form as the shrub behind her... did you notice!

He said it was hard to stay still for a long time... We can tell!

Natural Light and Led Lights

Description


Choose a subject that is illuminated by a mix of light from at least two different types of light sources. This subject can be indoors or outdoors. The sun can be one of those sources, or they can all be artificial.

Color Photography Assignment: Shooting Indoors under Artifical Light

Description

Choose a subject that is indoors and illuminated entirely by a single type of artificial light.  You may define the subject as narrowly or as broadly as you choose. It can be different aspects of a single room, or rooms throughout the world that all share a similarity. Or it can be a series of portraits all lit by candles. Be creative. Consider how the lighting gives character to the scene. Is it more effective to show the colorcast or to neutralize it? What does the color and quality of the light say about the subject? You can choose any artificial light source you want. The choice should be motivated by the content of the images.

Color Photography Assignment: Different Times Of The Day

Sunrise: It was a foggy morning so I didn't get what I wanted.

Mid-Morning

Zenith

Mid-Afternon: Sorry for the sunspots

Sunset

Information on this assignment:

The light of the sun is so common that many photographers do not carefully consider it. It is there every day, and most of the time there is plenty of it. Cameras even have a daylight white balance setting. However, in order to get the best possible photos when the sun is our main light source, we need to understand it on a more complex level.

Though it might seem that sunlight is much easier to work with than studio lights because we don't have to set up and take down the sun, it is actually more difficult than studio lights. The reason for this is that we do not have control over the direction, intensity, or degree of diffusion of sunlight with the same ease that we do with a studio light. Instead, we have to understand what happens in different conditions and wait for the lighting condition we are looking for. This requires a very different mindset and sometimes a great deal of patience on the part of the photographer.

Two of the most important things to know about sunlight. We will start with the most commonly encountered change in sunlight: clouds. Clouds between the sun and the subject of the photograph cause three important changes in sunlight.

First, clouds act as a diffusion screen. The larger and thicker the cloud, the softer the light on the subject. As the light gets more diffuse, the contrast range of the scene goes down. sunlight from a heavily overcast sky is the best thing for contrast control. It fills the shadows, wraps around the subject better than any softbox, and nearly always results in a contrast range that is well within the dynamic range of even the smallest and oldest digital camera. Overcast light also changes slowly over the course of the day. It is very easy to expose correctly for overcast lighting conditions, as long as you get the white balance right.

In addition to diffusing the light and lowering its intensity, clouds also raise the color temperature. This is where things get a little tricky. The exact color temperature of an overcast day is controlled by the color temperature of the sunlight before it passes through the clouds, as well as the altitude, time of year, and thickness of cloud cover.

The more clouds there are between the sun and the subject, the higher the color temperature of the light falling on the scene. An overcast day is almost always at least 6000K, and usually higher, up to 8-9000K in some cases. So if you set your camera's WB to daylight and shoot under a cloudy sky, you will have bluish, desaturated photos. The simple answer is to use a custom white balance for accurate color. Once you do, you will have rich, smooth colors that can be pushed to very high levels of saturation if desired as long as you use ETTR.

Fog is very similar to overcast light in terms of its affect on sunlight, but it lowers the intensity of the light even more. It is also the bluest type of cloud light unless it is very thin fog at sunrise or sunset. In those cases it can take on a diffused version of the colors of the sunset. On rare occasions, fog and mist on the horizon can refract the image of the sun that has already set and project a distorted, flattened version of the sun up into the sky just above the horizon. Since we don't know the sun has set, we see what looks like the sun being squeezed flat, then going down. On even rarer occasions, a green flash can be produced after the sun sets over the ocean, or the sun can appear to go down, then reappear briefly in a smaller, flattened version, before setting for good. All of these are optical phenomena caused by light refracting through fog and/or mist.

Fog is also much trickier than an overcast day because of its unique reflective properties. When sunlight hits the water particles that make up fog, it reflects off of their surfaces and can easily fool meters into thinking that the fog is much brighter than it actually is. A thin fog on a bright day is also one of the few situations that can fool an incident meter because of the way that this type of fog raises the apparent light level throughout the scene. Because of this, photographing fog is like photographing something white. You should always overexpose at least a stop beyond what your meter recommends. Even though it often appears very dark to the eye, a dense fog has similar reflective characteristics to a thin fog. Both require careful metering, overexposure, and frequent checking of the histogram.

Though the cause is similar to fog and overcast, clouds passing in front of the sun are a very different lighting condition. Like the other two, they diffuse the light and raise the color temperature when they are in front of the sun. However, when a cloud moves out from in front of the sun, the light level can jump four stops or more in a fraction of a second, while the color temperature goes down and the contrast range goes up significantly. The smaller the clouds themselves, the harder to shoot in this kind of light. Bright, mid-day sunlight with small clouds moving rapidly past the sun is a condition that should be avoided. The light changes too fast for an accurate exposure to be made without great difficulty. If forced to shoot in this type of conditions, you will need to use some type of light control. Fill flash and scrims of diffusion screens are the best option if your subject is small. Reflectors aren't as helpful because the exact direction of the key light changes with each new cloud. If you are shooting a wider view, this is one of the situations where waiting for the weather and light to change is usually the best plan.

Another situation to be avoided is very thin fog and/or high, thin overcast on a bright day in the middle of the day. In this condition, highlights are very hard and the sky is nearly white. Everything becomes intensely reflective and highlights are easily blown out. Midtones disappear and wide views become blown highlights and blocked up shadows. The type of light on these days also makes people squint, so your talent will be very uncomfortable if you are shooting a person.

Full sun in the middle of a brightly lit day with a clear sky is a very high-contrast lighting situation that is well outside of the capabilities of digital cameras to record detail in both highlight and shadow areas. However, many events that are photo-worthy take place in this kind of light. Sports events, outdoor festivals, and weddings (to name a few) are often scheduled specifically so that they can take place in this kind of light. If possible, choose subjects that are either fully lit by the sun or in full shade. Either of these situations will be within the dynamic range of your camera. Keep in mind that though full sun is around 5500K, full shade will be 6,000-8,000K. In addition, the color temperature of full sun does not vary significantly throughout a location, but the color temperature of shade varies greatly depending on how much of the sun is blocked by whatever is creating the shade. The deeper the shade, the bluer the color temperature. The “Shade” preset is a starting place, but a custom white balance is far more accurate when possible. The most important thing is not to leave your white balance set for full sun if your subject moves into the shade. When shooting a subject in full sun, don't forget that you must preserve the highlights and let the shadows go dark if a choice is to be made, since the highlights cannot be recovered once all the channels are blown out (255, 255, 255 in ACR and 100, 100, 100 in Lightroom). If you loose one or two channels, you may have severe difficulty recovering the detail. The best thing is to avoid clipping any of the channels by setting and accurate white balance at time of exposure and using your in-camera RGB histogram. Even better is shooting tethered to a computer when possible to check the histogram in the 16-bit ProPhoto space.

If you are working in events, documentary, or journalism and you must shoot a subject in a light condition where the subject is partly in shadow and partly in full sun at midday, the best contrast control options are reflectors and fill flash. If you are in the other genres of photography, the best choice is to come back later in the day when the contrast has gone down.

Full sun at midday does not have the same increase in color temperature as a cloudy, overcast, or foggy day does. Full sun at noon at sea level is right around 5500K. Depending on the camera, your white balance setting for “Daylight” preset can be anywhere from 5000K to 5900K. This is because different cameras render color differently. Two different cameras may need fairly different WB settings to render the same colors in the same way under the same light.

As the altitude increases, the color temperature of sunlight goes up. This is because the earth's atmosphere blocks the ultraviolet radiation emitted by the sun, to some extent. As we go higher, there is less thickness of atmosphere between the subject of the photo and the sun. The thinner atmosphere allows for more of the UV and near-UV wavelengths to reach the earth. UV gives us sunburn and the near-UV colors of blue, indigo, and violet become stronger in relation to the warmer colors of the spectrum. A significant white balance adjustment must be made at altitudes starting around 5-7,000 feet. From here up, the sunlight on a clear day is a blue or bluer than a cloudy day at sea level. Once we get to 9,000+ feet, the color temperature goes up to above 10,000K, as the chart at the beginning of this module mentions. At these altitudes, the contrast range is too great to photograph during most of the day. Sunrise and sunset are the best times.

Light changes with time of day. The clouds exaggerate or counteract what the sun is already doing. The same cycle occurs at high altitudes, but in an exaggerated manner.

Shortly before sunrise, when the sky is just starting to lighten, the color temperature is very high. At this time it is similar a heavily overcast day, even if the day is clear. The temperature warms slowly until the sun is about to rise. Starting just before the sun rises, the color temperature suddenly warms. Depending on location and time of year this switch to warm can take as little as five minutes or as long as an hour. Once the sun clears the horizon, the light is golden and very warm.

As the sun rises across the sky in the early morning, its light begins to cool again. By the time it reaches the zenith, it is around 5500K. As it travels back down again, the process repeats, but in reverse. The light warms slowly until just before sunset, where it jumps suddenly into the "golden hour." Then once the sun sets, the colors fade and the color temperature climbs rapidly until darkness takes over.

The contrast also changes as the day moves through the cycle of color. Before sunrise, the contrast is very low, often fairly high key and pastel compared to sunset. Contrast increases as the sun moves to the zenith, and then starts to decrease as it moves back down. During golden hour contrast can either decrease further (cloudy or misty) or go up again when the shadows get longer (clear day). Once the sun drops below the horizon, the contrast plunges to almost nothing for a brief period, and then darkness falls.

Shadows also change length and character throughout the day. Before sunrise they are extremely diffuse. Once the sun rises, they appear suddenly and are very long. As the day progresses they shorten and develop sharper edges until the sun reaches the zenith, when they are directly below the object casting them. In the afternoon, they lengthen until the sun sets, when the diffuse and disappear into night.

When shooting to capture the colors of sunrise and sunset or to take advantage of the lower contrast during those times, there are a few things to keep in mind.

• Meter often.
• Use your knowledge of white balance to interpret the light.
• Know your location.
• 
  
  
  The light changes very quickly, sometimes losing or gaining several stops in a few minutes. Shooting at sunrise and sunset requires advanced planning and lots of experience. Sometimes you only have a few seconds to meter, set the camera, and take the shot before the light is completely gone.
  
  
  Do the research to find out when sunset is and how long the golden hour is likely to be at a given time of year. Sometimes this means taking notes one year, then waiting the 12 months until that condition comes around again. If you can't do that, find someone who has done it for the location you want to shoot at and ask him or her.
  
  
  
  

Assignment Details:

Choose a subject that will take on different aspects as the light changes over the course of a day. You will need to be able to visit the location at least five different times over the course of a single day. You may shoot as many different scenes as are necessary to turn in the following images:

• Shot 1: Sunrise - Within one hour of sunrise
• Shot 2: Midmorning - at least three hours after sunrise
• Shot 3: The sun at its zenith - Within one hour of 12 PM (high noon)
• Shot 4: Midafternoon - Shadows starting to lengthen (3 PM or later)
• Shot 5: Sunset - Within one hour of sunset

Use ETTR metering, a tripod, and bracket every shot if your subject matter allows. Don't turn in the full bracket. Turn in only the best exposure. The five different shots need not be of the same viewpoint. They do need to be in the same general area so that you are seeing a single locations light change over a single day rather than different times of day at different locations. Keep in mind that light is an uncertain thing. Stay flexible in the details of your subject matter to take advantage of the best light. And don't forget that reflectors work great with sunlight.

Since the ultimate reason for understanding light is to make photographs that speak to the viewer, your five images should be related either conceptually or formally.

You should have a total of five images for this assignment.

Purpose

• To gain a better understanding of how to capture high-quality images in sunlight. 

Color Photography Assignment: Exposing to the Right

There are some slight differences from the Exposed To The Right and the standard metering images: More detail in the ETTR.

Here is some useful information:

If you have learned the basics of how a digital camera operates and some information on what RAW files are and how to use Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) to process them. A more in-depth understanding of how to use ACR will allow you to get the most out of RAW files you already have.  There is a step that comes before the portion of RAW file workflow. This step is exposing a RAW file to get the best possible quality out of the final image. To do this, we must learn new habits of metering and making exposure decisions that are different than anything used for film or JPEG capture.

The goal of previous metering techniques was placing the tones in the captured image where the photographer wanted them to be, based on a subjective interpretation of the scene. In other words, if something is grey in the scene, it should be grey in the photograph. And if it is black in the scene, it should be black in the photograph. This exposure strategy still works for RAW files, and high-quality results can be obtained when using it.

However, there is another strategy that, when used properly, results in richer colors and an effective increase in dynamic range. This is called "expose to the right," or ETTR for short. It is based on a deeper understanding of how digital cameras capture and process data. The histogram is the key to successful use of ETTR.

Imagine that we are working with a sensor that has a dynamic range of five stops. This is a safe bet, as most RAW files taken by a DSLR come from a sensor that has a dynamic range of at least five stops. This sensor takes a picture and the histogram from that image is displayed on the camera's LCD. 

Due to the fact that digital sensors, both CMOS and CCD are linear capture devices, 50% of the data they capture is placed into the first stop of dynamic range (represented by Stop 1). 25% is in the next stop, 12.5% in the stop after that and so on down to the last stop that contains 3.125% of the sensor's potential ability to record information. In this picture, 50% of the potential data is unused.

Digital capture is a binary world. Anything that does not have a value of one must have a value of zero. If there is no actual data in that part of the histogram, the in-camera processing compensates for this by filling the space with zeros. These zeros are the digital equivalent of radio static.

There are observable results of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In the case of radio, the signal is the music and the noise is the static. A high SNR in radio gives you music with little or no static. A low SNR gives you lots of static and very little music. In digital capture, there are two places where SNR comes into play. The first is the initial exposure stage. The second is related to ISO. 

A low SNR in a digital file will give you higher contrast, higher noise, less accurate color, and a loss of detail, especially in the shadows. A high SNR will give you just the opposite. The resulting images from a file that has a high SNR will have more detail throughout the image, accurate color, less noise, and lower contrast. The combination of lower contrast and more shadow detail extends the usable dynamic range of the camera's sensor. 

This image has a much higher SNR, and will therefore have higher quality across the board. It is using the first stop of dynamic range to capture the bulk of the detail in the image.

The goal of ETTR is to capture the maximum possible amount of data in the file. Photos that were shot using this strategy will require more work in ACR than photos shot with the standard exposure strategy. Using ETTR also effectively lowers the sensors ISO, because it requires longer shutter speeds or large apertures to let in the additional light required to move the histogram to the right. However, if the intent of the photographer is to produce the maximum possible quality, then these minor drawbacks are well worth it. If the intent is to rapidly deliver a file to a situation where speed of arrival is more important than ultimate quality, then the standard exposure strategy is the best choice. 

An image that was exposed using ETTR will always look far too bright, with low saturation and washed-out color. This is normal. Adding contrast and saturation does not harm such an image. Turning up the blacks in ACR and turning down the exposure (the two most common adjustments made to an ETTR image) have the added benefit of reducing noise.

In order to use ETTR properly, the photographer must pay even more careful attention to the camera and to contrast ratio measurement. Even though we are trying to maximize data by moving the histogram to the right, regardless of the actual tone, we still cannot clip our highlights. Once highlight detail is lost, it is gone forever. It is also important to get to know your particular camera. Some camera models have a much higher tolerance for exposures above the suggested reading than others. More expensive, pro-level cameras are more likely to be able to tolerate overexposure than the less expensive entry-level cameras.

Here are the assignment details:

Choose a subject where shadow detail is important to properly represent what you would like us to see about the subject.

Shoot five different scenes, with two images of each scene. The five different scenes should be related either formally or conceptually.

For each scene, shoot one shot exposed using standard metering techniques and one shot using ETTR. They should be identically framed, so don't forget to use a tripod.

Color Photography Assignment: White Balance

White balance is one of the most effective ways to control color and one of the greatest sources of confusion for people who learn about it. Understanding white balance to the point where you can use it as a creative tool should be the goal of all who work in color digital photography.

The term white balance applies to a setting made in your camera. Think of white balance as an expectation. When your camera's white balance is set to daylight, it expects that whatever you are shooting is lit by the sun. When you set it to tungsten, it expects that the scene will be lit by a standard Edison Base Tungsten Filament light bulb. If you set your camera to one of these settings, but shoot under candlelight or fluorescent light instead, the camera doesn't get what it is expecting, and a white balance mismatch occurs. The result is that your photograph will have a colorcast. 

Here are the instructions for this assignment:

Shoot 7 different images. These can be all of the same scene or of any combination of the same and different scenes. Shooting all images of the same scene is much more difficult and requires both a greater understanding of white balance and access to a variety of different light sources that can be made to shine on the same location.
Set your white balance to custom for all shots. No auto white balance. It is strongly suggested that you meter using an external meter as opposed to using the matrix meter in the camera.
Use custom white balance to render the scenes in the following manner:
* Shot 1: This shot should have a neutral white balance.
* Shot 2: This shot should have a distinctly red colorcast throughout the image
* Shot 3: This shot should have a distinctly green colorcast throughout the image
* Shot 4: This shot should have a distinctly blue colorcast throughout the image
* Shot 5: This shot should have a distinctly cyan colorcast throughout the image
* Shot 6: This shot should have a distinctly magenta colorcast throughout the image
* Shot 7: This shot should have a distinctly yellow colorcast throughout the image