Weekly Photo Challenge: Glow

In photography, there is often a lot said about the golden hour, including the fact that there are two of them. Like a lot of the rules of photography, you get some great results by paying attention, it is a fabulous time for natural light to infuse your photography.

Very nice, but my life often doesn’t work that way.  I have to make do with the light I have at the time. As a result, I’m almost always thinking about lighting and working with what I have to make a nice photograph.  Here is a nice bit of light I found and exploited:

ISO 1600 19mm f/22 1/250

To me, this photo is all about the soft glow of red and orange tones.  Here is the scene as I originally saw and shot it:

ISO 1600 19mm f/22 1/250

When I was taking this photo, I wanted to get as much of the scene as possible, so that included sky and surrounding trees, even though I thought I might be cropping later. When I went to edit the photo, I added an orange tinted filter and also boosted the orange and red tones in the photo, their saturation and luminance.

As far as cropping went, I used another rule of photography, and that is the rule of thirds.  Here is a screen shot with the rule of thirds grid applied to the photo as I was cropping:

Screen shot of the cropping process.

What I was thinking was that the docked boats were the point of interest and most prominent part of the orange tones. It was the way the light was illuminating the interior of the boats that made me take a photo in the first place. I have placed them at one of the grid intersections. This size crop also allows for the curve of the bridge and the people on it to be standing in a spot where your eye is likely to rest.  These are things that strengthen the composition of this image.

What do you think, do you like my interpretation of the light and the crop of this image? Your comments are welcome below.

Cheers!

Weekly Photo Challenge: The Golden Hour

In the early morning, I sometimes take my camera out to my hedgerow. We have a lot of wildlife living there.  But on the morning a few weeks ago that I got this photo, I went out because from my kitchen window I could see this robin fledgling:

ISO 800 50mm 0ev f/5 1/100

Since it is learning to fly, there is still the opportunity to get fairly close them.  I will show the original photo at the bottom of the post, so you will see that by cropping the photo I made it seem like I was even closer.  I also mention the cropping because when I saw this through the view finder I knew that I would crop it.  First because some of the surrounding detail was distracting and secondly because this robin is pretty much exactly on a point for the rule of thirds.  The rule of thirds is a photography rule that I don’t always follow, but I almost always consider.

The weekly photo challenge this week is the golden hour. This photo was taken in the early morning of an overcast day.  The challenge was to get the robin at such an angle, so that it was lit enough to show the detail in the feathers.  I also like to be able to see at least one eye, preferably with a catch light in it.  This photo was the one where that came together.  I have several other versions that went into the trash bin.  Because it was still a bit dark, I used an ISO of 800.  I think that my camera can handle that with almost no noise in the final image.  I set my shutter speed to 1/100 with the thought of freezing any motion in the bird.  I have my f-stop at f/5, because I thought I would get enough detail in the bird, and as I had said before, I knew I was going to do some cropping.

Here is the original image:

ISO 800 50mm 0ev f/5 1/100

Those of you who read this blog regularly know that I like to follow the robins that live in my area.  While our nest by the kitchen this year had a bittersweet end to it, I have been glad to see that we do have several robin fledglings that seem to be doing well in the hedgerow.

Thoughts or questions about how I got the photo? Feel free to leave them below.

Cheers!