The Reality of Lighting when Traveling
We have all read a great deal of blogs about pros as well as books by pros. In these books, there is a great deal of information about lighting, but the golden rule is if you want to take good landscape photos the best light occurs either early in the morning or in the late afternoon.
The reality of course, is that this is often not an option for us mere mortals. We do not have the flexibility to get up at the wee hours of the morning and trek to a good spot that we scoped out the day before and stay there for several hours getting good shots. If we did this, our families would kill us.
Therefore much of the light we get to shoot in is of the worst kind. It occurs when the sun is high above during the mid day. The other reality is that you may find that the sky is cloudy and ugly on that particular day. However, this does not necessarily mean that all hope is lost. There are a number of options available to you and in this post, as well as future ones, I will go over these in more detail.
First, there are some things that you can do to get that ideal morning or late afternoon light without dragging your family out of bed. This is possible through prior planning. If you make sure that your hotel is located near some interesting sites, you can wake up early in the morning to photograph them and return to join your family for breakfast.
For instance, on a recent trip to Turkey I made sure to stay in the Sultanahment area – which contains the Blue Mosque and the Haghia Sofia – along with a host of other interesting places. This enabled me to get out and shoot some photos in the morning. I would wake up around six in the morning, shoot for a bit, then join my family for breakfast. It also enabled me to get some shots of these crowded places with fewer people in the shots. My wife loved this solution as she appreciated sleeping in a bit and when we did get out I didn’t stop every few minutes to take a picture.
However, this does not work well for day trips – when you are seeing locations further from your hotel. In these cases, you almost always wind up seeing the site during the middle of the day.
You will of course not get dramatic sunrise or sunset lighting during this time, but a blue sky is better than a blown out sky. There are several options that I make use of during these times.
The easiest option is to simply pay attention to the light. For example, most of the time if you are facing horrible light, if you turn around you will find the lighting much better. Always avoid shooting towards the sun. This sounds very simple, but you would be surprised how many times you’ll find yourself doing it.
There will be times though, when you simply cannot get behind your subject or your prefer the viewpoint that looks almost right into the sun. In this case, you will have to contend with the wide dynamic range. Of course, you don’t always have to get all of the dynamic range in there. I am a sucker for silhouette shots, though many others don’t like them.
Another option is to take an HDR shot. This is particularly useful inside dark buildings where the outside is very bright. Of course, you may not like the effect, but in many cases this is the best way to get the closest to the full dynamic range.
Even in this shot, the dynamic range was too much to get the outside behind the door correctly exposed. However, it did improve the gleaming light on the floors and in the windows above. As tripods and monopods are often not allowed, I shoot these HDR shots handheld using exposure bracketing. Unfortunately, Canon is still brain dead in this area and only allows three shots on all but the 1D series cameras. To compensate for this, I set the bracketing to every two stops and shoot in RAW.
The other option, which also works for cloudy days when even exposed sky will be white, is to add the sky in post processing. This is quite easy to do, though it takes some time to get it perfect. The following is a shot taken during a cloudy day.
The following is the same shot with a bit of editing. It is still a bit raw, but gives the basic idea.
To do this, I took the shot above and another shot with a better sky and did the following.
1) Copied the shot above as a new layer on the one with the sky.
2) Selected the white sky using the magic selector.
3) Deleted the bad sky – replacing it with the better one.
4) Burned the building a bit in order to make it look a bit more natural.
I do not advocate using this as an escape, but there are times when the scene is very interesting and the weather just refuses to cooperate. A true pro would stay in a location for a good period of time and wait for the right weather, but the rest of us need to deal with what we are given.
This certainly is not an exhaustive list of what is possible, but I hope it has illustrated that it is still possible to get good shots without waking the family at 4 AM every morning and trekking them to the same spots to get the best light.
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Tags: HDR, lighting, photography, processing, Travel