Today I'm starting a new series on my blog for photographers call "Behind the Image." In addition to the topics that I get questions about and address on my F.A.Q.s posts, I often get asked about what went into creating specific images. As you know, I love to share info and so that's exactly what I'm going to do in this series. So as you browse through my blog, if an image catches your eye, feel free to ask me to feature it in an upcoming "Behind the Image" post.
Today I'm going to talk about this image that I shot during Adam & Marie's ceremony last Saturday:
Today I'm going to talk about this image that I shot during Adam & Marie's ceremony last Saturday:
I love shooting images like this with the entire sun in the shot that really place the event within it's beautiful location. But there's a few tricks -- both in-camera and during post-production -- to doing this well.
In Camera:
This image was shot in RAW with my Canon 5D, on manual, hand held, with a Canon 16-35mm 2.8 lens, at a focal length of 16mm, f18, 1/50 of a second & ISO 100.
The KEY to getting the sun defined as a star shape and being able to see the rays of light is the aperture setting. You need to close down your aperture as small as possible. Because of how bright it was, I maxed out my settings (low ISO, low shutter-speed) and the smallest aperture I could shoot at in order to correctly expose this shot was f18. It worked great, but try to get your aperture as close to f22 as possible.
Another key is to shoot these type of images in RAW. You'll see why a little later.
When taking this shot, just rely on your in-camera meter and expose as it indicates. This is what my image looked like directly out of the camera:
In Camera:
This image was shot in RAW with my Canon 5D, on manual, hand held, with a Canon 16-35mm 2.8 lens, at a focal length of 16mm, f18, 1/50 of a second & ISO 100.
The KEY to getting the sun defined as a star shape and being able to see the rays of light is the aperture setting. You need to close down your aperture as small as possible. Because of how bright it was, I maxed out my settings (low ISO, low shutter-speed) and the smallest aperture I could shoot at in order to correctly expose this shot was f18. It worked great, but try to get your aperture as close to f22 as possible.
Another key is to shoot these type of images in RAW. You'll see why a little later.
When taking this shot, just rely on your in-camera meter and expose as it indicates. This is what my image looked like directly out of the camera:
The image is o.k. but we don't see the full tonal range that you'd like to see in an image like this. The sky is washed out and the sun is lost in it. There are a few tricks to making this image look it's best in post-production.
Post-production:
The first step of post-production on this image is a trick I picked up from Matt Nicolosi's blog last July. He has a great post on creating an HDR image. Feel free to read the full post and I'll give you a summary version here.
An HDR (High Dynamic Range) image is basically one with a lot of detail in it. Looking at the above image, we want to get more detail out of it in both the highlight and shadow areas. Because Photoshop doesn't do a great job of creating HDR images, it's well worth it to download Photomatix ($99) for this purpose. Using your image editing software (Photoshop or Lightroom) create a couple .jpgs from your RAW file that are at different exposure levels. Below are the two exposures I created. In the first I looked at the sky and underexposed the image overall so that I could get the detail in the sky that I am looking for. In the second image I looked at the lower half of the image and exposed so that I could see sufficient details there.
Post-production:
The first step of post-production on this image is a trick I picked up from Matt Nicolosi's blog last July. He has a great post on creating an HDR image. Feel free to read the full post and I'll give you a summary version here.
An HDR (High Dynamic Range) image is basically one with a lot of detail in it. Looking at the above image, we want to get more detail out of it in both the highlight and shadow areas. Because Photoshop doesn't do a great job of creating HDR images, it's well worth it to download Photomatix ($99) for this purpose. Using your image editing software (Photoshop or Lightroom) create a couple .jpgs from your RAW file that are at different exposure levels. Below are the two exposures I created. In the first I looked at the sky and underexposed the image overall so that I could get the detail in the sky that I am looking for. In the second image I looked at the lower half of the image and exposed so that I could see sufficient details there.
Then I used Photomatix to merge the two exposures into one HDR image. It's very easy to use and you don't even know exactly what it's doing but in the end you get a beautiful image with much more detail in the full tonal range.
Next I used the clone tool in PS to clean up the sensor dust spots that inevitably show up in the sky when you close down your aperture-- NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU CLEAN YOUR SENSOR!!! No, actually I use these handy things and they work pretty well. But inevitably you still have a few spots to clean up.
I also used the clone stamp to tone down the orange sun spot in the trees that distracted my eye as well as the sun spot in the upper right.
Then I ran Kevin Kubota's X-process combo action at about 18%, used magic sharp (also Kevin Kubota) for sharpening and WA-LA!
Next I used the clone tool in PS to clean up the sensor dust spots that inevitably show up in the sky when you close down your aperture-- NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU CLEAN YOUR SENSOR!!! No, actually I use these handy things and they work pretty well. But inevitably you still have a few spots to clean up.
I also used the clone stamp to tone down the orange sun spot in the trees that distracted my eye as well as the sun spot in the upper right.
Then I ran Kevin Kubota's X-process combo action at about 18%, used magic sharp (also Kevin Kubota) for sharpening and WA-LA!
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