Let’s talk about taking these kinds of images and getting something you’ll be happy with.   The key is planning because this photography exercise is challenging.  You’ve got fast moving subjects that are too busy trying not to drown to pose in the exact spot you want.  The lighting is bad, with bright highlights and deep shadows that will cause havoc with your exposure meter.  The best locations are down near the water, and it’s a wet, slippery place to be playing with expensive camera gear.  Sounds like fun, huh?  Well, it sure beats joining those loons in the plastic boats!

The easiest way to get sharp photos in this environment is to maximize your shutter speed.  Generally, this is 1/500th of a second or faster.  This shouldn’t be too difficult in the bright daylight.  If there are clouds or the shade is too deep where you want to shoot, you’ll need to bump up the ISO as high as you can without getting noisy images.  You do know where that is on your camera, right?  If not, take some practice shots prior to your arrival, steadily increasing the ISO until you see visible noise (random pixels of color and light) in your image.  Keep your ISO setting lower than your noise limit.  Since every camera has different low light capabilities, I can’t give you an exact number.  Your aperture setting depends on how much depth of field you want in your image.  I usually keep this setting in the mid-range.  You can open this up to get faster shutter speeds.  Your camera is ready.

The lighting problems can be extreme.  Trees line the banks, creating deep shade, in contrast to the bright sun bouncing light from the water, rocks, and bright kayaks.  There is dappled light coming through the leaves on the trees.  If you put your camera into a mode that allows automatic exposure settings (Program, Automatic, Shutter Priority, Aperture Priority), your camera’s meter will constantly change, making adjustments as you follow the kayaker through the course.  Many of these shots will be hopelessly flawed. I’ve found that shooting several test shots and varying my settings, allows me to find the best solution.  Then, I set those into my camera and leave it in Manual mode.

Location is always important.  Most rivers have several good locations to get the kind of shot you want.  You can get up high for look down at the river, like the shot on the left.  Move a little closer to the river to create an image that makes your viewer think “What a pleasant way to spend the day.”

To create the most exciting shots that convey the triumph, apprehension, and sheer looniness of this sport, you need to get down to the water.  Fill the frame with your subject.  Get the water behind them to show its menacing turbulence. A low shot makes the water look like a wall.  There were many times when my Wife, DaughterNumberTwo, and DaughterInLaw made it through the chute alive and upright.  Whew!

Shoot continuously to catch all the action.  Things are moving quickly, and you want to catch them at just the right moment.  (Dude, there are huge rocks under there!)

I loved those weeks down there with the family.  Lots of fun with my camera.  I even went down the river myself.  How’d I do?  Well….

The clone stamp tool lets you select something from within your image and paste a duplicate copy of that area over another part of the image.  When you move your brush, the selected area moves in parallel, and whatever is there will be pasted into your picture.  Without some care you can get eyeballs onto walls, and all sorts of unintended results.

As with most tools in Photoshop you can select the brush size and how soft the edges are from the brush panel at the top.

Keeping the edges soft and the brush size as close to what your target area is, helps hide the effect.  That of course is the idea, you don’t want people to even know that you’ve been there.

Next on the menu bar is the blend Mode box.  These need a tutorial all of their own, but provide a largely untapped level of control. You can choose to only impact dark colors or light colors, for now, you can leave it in Normal mode for most applications.

Opacity allows you to build up layers of sampling, you can hover over the word Opacity and the “scrubby sliders” will appear, all you have to do is drag your cursor left or right to decrease/increase how much transparency you want.  Of course you can type in 50% or 20% or whatever you chose.

I’m not going to touch Flow, as I’ve never adjusted it in all my jobs.  I’m going to skip on over to the layer selection.  Sample:, helps protect your original image.  To me it is important never to damage the original picture, so everything I do is done on its own separate layer.  That way I retain complete control and can go back, even months later if I want to adjust something.  You can sample from the current layer, the ones below, or from all layers.

Remember our groom?  His suit definitely had some issues.

Both his dark suit and white shirt needed repair.  Here is what those repairs look like on their own layer.  They are built up with different levels of opacity and re-sampled frequently to avoid being obvious.

When combined together, well if you look closely enough you can tell, but…

There are tricks to working along the edges and in transition areas, but we will save those for later.

If you really want to know how lots more detail about how it is done, read Katrin Eismann’s wonderful book Photoshop ® Restoration and Retouching.

Here is the original as scanned with my high resolution scanner.  You might notice a few “issues”.  Faded yellow, cracked, stained and oh, yeah missing a top right corner which cuts a lady’s face in two.

The first challenge is picking a place to start.  Although I didn’t know it at the time, I should have immediately restored the whites to white and the blacks to black.  I did it later and it worked out, but that wasn’t smart.  I divided the picture into large areas; the groom, the bride, the background, and the big tear.  Both the bride and groom were further divided into clothing, hands, face and hair, while I took the background into regions.  As I worked on each of these, I did so on separate individual layers.  That way when I messed up, and I did, I could a. not ruin the entire picture, and b. see and correct small manageable chunks.  In Photoshop, you can also adjust the opacity of each layer separately, which is nice.

So I looked at the picture and chose to work on the groom’s suit.  Broad surfaces, not overly detailed.  In restoration, the clone stamp tool, the healing brush and layer masks are your standard weapons.  In follow on blogs, we will drill down into the right ways and point out some “less right”—ok, wrong ways these can be used.  Carefully masking out his outline, in order to prevent spill over, I reached the first signs of progress. 

I wasn’t ready to tackle the detail in the bride’s dress or hair yet, so I fixed the background.  Matching random wall paper is harder than it looks, as is making the details in columns, lights and mirrors look “natural”.

After a few weeks, I felt my technique had improved enough to be ready to take on repairing the bride.

I left the missing corner for last as I had to decide what to do about the half a person in the picture.  I finally made the hard decision that I didn’t have enough information to try and create all her missing features, so she disappeared into the wall paper.  This is where the details become important and where the human eye can reveal more.  We notice shadows, when they are out of place.  So I had to create a suitable shadow of the bride on the now restored wall. The ability to use that layer opacity was very important here.

Finally, using curves and levels I fixed the overall tone of the picture and slapped on a new white border.

It took quite a while, but that was because I was learning as I went along.  It gets faster and is worth the effort.

The difference is the dynamic range of our eyes and brains versus the lens and sensor of the camera, and we still beat the machines.  We have all seen the results in photographs.  People with their cameras set to the “Program” mode will show you their images with a subject near a bright light source and a couple of silhouettes or pictures of people surrounded by a bright light and burned out skies.  The camera cannot handle the extremes between the shadows and highlights.  Let’s take the camera off the “P” and try this technique.

If you don’t have a program like Photoshop, you should expose for the highlights and add some flash to light the subjects.  Most new photographers never think of using flash in the daylight, but it can really make quite a difference.  If you can control the amount of flash output, you can blend the flash into the scene so that people won’t even know it was used.  This works well and allows you to get a feeling of a greater dynamic range within the camera.

If you use Photoshop, you can buy plug-ins that assist you in creating a high dynamic range (HDR) image.  I don’t usually use this technique, so I haven’t bought any of the HDR plug-ins.  You can still take advantage of Photoshop to create an HDR if you take your time and plan out your workflow.

The first step is to pre-plan the images.  In order to bring all the variations of the scene into the computer, you usually take 3-5 images of the scene, with a constant aperture and varying the shutter speeds.  Shoot at least one image slower than the camera solution (constant aperture) and one faster than the camera solution.  This produces images that are properly exposed for different portions of the scene.  For the best result, you should use a tripod to keep the framing of the scene constant.   So you get three images like these:

You can see from the images that I didn’t use a tripod on these (I was on a photowalk). I imported the images and aligned them in Photoshop.  Once aligned, they were combined into a single image that more closely represents what I saw.  Yeah, I did a little tweaking, too.

We don’t go into all the details on this blog, but you can find instruction about this technique all over the web.  So, grab some images and have fun creating an image that can’t be done inside today’s cameras.

You have seen several examples of this – just look up at our banner.  The panoramas are many images, stitched together in post-processing, into one image.  You could capture a version of the panorama in the camera with a wide angle lens, but the dimensions wouldn’t be the same, and, with the lower resolution, you couldn’t create the great 48” wide images as sharply. (And do me a favor and bug Mark to fix his images in the banner.)

Well, it was really quiet in the house this weekend, and I was reading about some compositing techniques in Photoshop.  Playing around with the program is the best way to learn it.  Any way, I figured I would do a quick overview of the procedure, since I happened to have some images that were made for this.  So why don’t we do a quick walk-through that demonstrates creating a single image from various components and then creating a composite with the results.  The real time-killer here is removing the background from the final airplane image.  I actually did that back in February and just hadn’t gotten around to playing with it.  The creation of the composites below only took about five minutes, total.

Back in January, Mark and I went to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum out near Dulles Airport to make some airplane images. (Warning: Tripods are not allowed.)   They have lots of historic aircraft packed into a hanger-like museum.  It is nearly impossible to find a clean shot anywhere – that place is packed with airplanes!  Then you have that corrugated look to the ceiling.  The planes are great, but, their surrounds, not so much.  I knew as soon as I entered that there was going to be some serious post-processing work and went forward with that in mind.  I took many shots, but I really liked this fighter.  I had no idea what I was going to do with this shot, so I shot the plane in pieces.  This allows me to keep the resolution high if I need a big plane somewhere.  Here are three of the component images:

When you do this, make sure the exposure settings are the same for all the images.  Switch your camera to “manual” to ensure your camera doesn’t change the aperture (and depth of field) while you’re moving through the different shots.  If you do any post-processing on one of the components, apply the same changes to all of them.  Then, stitch them together into one image.

That’s nice, but it’s a little dark.  I need add some more punch to the image and get rid of some of the extraneous stuff around the plane.  We need to isolate the plane from the ceiling, other planes, etc.   And shouldn’t the prop be spinning?  (You can do that by copying the prop; applying some motion blur; and offsetting it from the still prop.)

Now you have an image you can use in composites with other images.  Here are three that have some promise.  I need to work on them a little more, but you can see what I’m talking about in these rough drafts.  Yes, I know that in the third image the lighting is wrong, but I’m just having fun – how about you?