In the Light and in the Dark

Recently in Munich, I had the opportunity to visit the Residence Museum. The oldest room in the residence is the Antiquarium, built between 1568-71.  You know you have a lot of antique sculptures when you commission a 66-meter long hall to house them. Might sound like a bit of an over the top extravagance, but Duke Albrecht V did it with style in my opinion. This was a favorite stop of mine on the tour of the museum:

ISO 800 f/11 1/250sec 21mm

This room was filled with many beautiful things, but what I enjoyed photographing was the play between the light and dark spaces. There was a lot of interesting potential in this room in addition to the beautiful objects. Here is my interpretation of the file above:

ISO 800 f/11 1/250sec 21mm

I started with a crop that would maintain some of the arches and some of the darker spaces. I brought the shadows up a bit, particularly in the wall detail. I added filters that would increase the warmth and dreamy feel of the light in the room. For me, this edit was a lot of back and forth with the various sliders, until I came up with a combination that I liked.

What do you think of the edit? Can you imagine owning so much art that you would have to build entire rooms to display it? I have a hard time wrapping my head around that idea, I suspect I would loan items like that to museums or something.  Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!

Added to Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, Silhouettes.

 

Telling A Story

To tell a story effectively with a photo, a useful tool can be framing. It’s a way of drawing the viewer’s eye towards the tale you would like to tell. On a recent edit I started with this file:

ISO 250 f/11 1/100 sec 28mm

It was a beautiful scene, but even as I shot it, I knew editing would help me get to what I really wanted to show, which is this:

ISO 250 f/11 1/100 sec 28mm

I am currently using a Canon 80D as my main body. I’m happy with it but I have noticed that it is better to shoot an image underexposed rather than perfectly exposed or overexposed. Now, in general, that was true of my 50D as well, but I feel like it is more pronounced with this camera. I shoot in RAW, so even though the original file is dark, there is a lot of detail there.

Since this is really a post about framing, I will stick with talking about how I approached this shot. While shooting this file, I went ahead and took in as much of the scene as possible. My first edit, in this case, was a crop. I’ve left plenty of water and vegetation around the waterfall for context. I then used the vignette to help with the framing. I set the center at the closest visible water convergence. This should lead your eye to the most dynamic part of the image and allow the rocks and vegetation play their supporting role. So a crop and a vignette, two of the more basic edits, but an effective way to create a frame. Do you agree? Feel free to leave a comment below about this approach or its outcome below.

Regular readers will know I fell out of the blogosphere about a month ago. While it wasn’t an entirely planned break, I’m grateful to say it was a happy one. It included a two-week road trip in Europe. The photo above was taken during this time and is part of the Edelfrauengrab Waterfall in Germany’s Black Forest region. I’m happy to be back and look forward to catching up with my fellow bloggers.

Cheers!

Added to Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, Framing the Shot.