Category: On Exploring Photography

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Editing with Lightroom!

While studying photography this past year, I’ve learned that the most prevalent photo-editing software out there seems to be a program called Lightroom. (I don’t want to admit how long it took me to realize that this is a pun on “dark room”, where all the photographic magic used to happen.) I figured that eventually I would need to get myself familiar with Lightroom and start using it for my photo edits; I also figured that to get the best results from this, I would need to start shooting eventually in the RAW format. I’ve been shooting in JPEG up until now, because it’s just easier for me to use when I’m still learning the ins and outs of the camera itself. I’m a big fan of segmenting the learnings, and tackling one thing at a time; right now, I’m barely starting to get kinda good with the camera by itself. Besides, I got time!

Which isn’t to say I haven’t been doing any editing at all! No, I’ve been using a nice (and free!) app called Snapseed to do editing to this point. It’s nice because it’s mobile and it’s pretty powerful, so I’ve been doing all my main photo editing on that app, on my tablet. I could use Snapseed on my phone, but I like the bigger screen of the tablet. My plan was to sign up for a Lightroom subscription soon, likely in the spring.

Well, I just learned when my Flickr Pro account renewed that it comes with a free three-month trial for Lightroom. I got this all set up last night, and now, yada yada, I’ve done my first edits! What follows are the original shot, followed by my edited version. I didn’t go too dramatic with my edits, but I deepened and intensified the colors in some spots, added some vignetting (I love a bit of vignetting), decreased the detail sharpness just a bit for a slightly more dreamy appearance, and I upped the contrast a bit. I quite like the result.

(The picture was taken from Canalside in downtown Buffalo, where I was able to look through the space between the ground-level and the I-190 underpass for a bit of framing. I also like framing.)

 

Some photographers I follow are able to use Lightroom to get some fascinating and quite dramatic results with their original photos. This is an aspect of photography that I am greatly anticipating learning!

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Let the river run….

It is rapidly turning out that water is one of my favorite subjects for photography. It does so many fascinating things, and its relationship with light is particularly fascinating….

The top three are of Buffalo Creek as it flows past the Charles Burchfield Art and Nature Center. As the Creek tumbles over the rock beds there, it makes a nice bit of mild whitewater. The very first photo shows a phenomenon that whitewater boaters call a “hole”, when the water rushes over a rock in the stream and then falls back on itself, making a small water feature that looks like a pile of water flowing upstream.

The bottom two photos are of one of the many tiny streams that flow through Chestnut Ridge Park. The channel through which the stream is flowing in the first of these two photos is only about six or seven feet deep at that point, but just a few hundred feet downstream this small gully becomes a deep gorge that I assume to be at least fifty feet deep, if not more. The bottom photo is of one of the waterfalls that this stream plunges over. Note the ice crystals covering the far wall of the gorge, where the winter sun never shines….

 

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Scenes from Downtown Buffalo and Canalside

For a long time I’ve wanted to go down to Canalside, a sort-of public commons area on the Inner Waterfront in downtown Buffalo, to take photos of the people ice-skating on the rink there. I finally did just that last week, and while downtown I took the Metro Rail up to the Theater District and then walked back down Main Street to Canalside, where I took a few more pictures of skaters, as a couple of hours had passed by then.

Here are some of the resulting photos.

More, including expandable versions of these photos, available in this Flickr album.

As you can see, the light that day was gray, diffuse, and overcast–which is some great light to shoot in. (So far in my photography journey, I am not being choosey about the light I choose to shoot in or not to shoot in; I need to figure out how all the light works, so I don’t let the light be a factor in whether I go out or not. Now, as the day went on, the gray misty air eventually shifted into actual drizzle, which I probably should not have been out in, given the one substantial fault of the camera I bought: its lack of weather sealing. The camera was wetter than I would have liked by the time I finally got back to the car. Note to self: take the camera bag with you on days like this!

I also couldn’t help noticing, as I always do when I’m on Main St. in downtown Buffalo, that the city is on Year Thirty of feeling like it’s going to wake up and be a proper city oh, any day now. Of course, it hasn’t happened yet; there are still too few people and too few businesses down there to make for really interesting street photography. But hey, I’m not losing hope.

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Misty morning at Knox Farm

December has not been a good month for photography. The weather has been incredibly reliable this month: on any day when I have time to get outside someplace and walk about and take photos, the weather has been absolute garbage. And unfortunately, as much as I love my Lumix FZ1000ii, my biggest knock on it is that it has no weather-sealing.

But on Christmas Eve I did finally get out to Knox Farm even though it was misty and damp. Here are a few results:

 

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To the eternal flame

Erie County’s Chestnut Ridge park is one of my favorite places and has been for years. This park, larger than New York City’s Central Park, is set on the side of one of the higher hills to the south of Buffalo, and it is dominated by streams and gorges and beautiful meadows and one large hill that’s the regions preeminent spot for sledding when there’s snow…and there are even a few waterfalls.

One such waterfall is particularly beloved, not just because it’s beautiful in itself, but because there’s a hollow spot worn into the shale bed over which it drops, and from this hollow spot leaks a small flow of natural gas. This gas burns with beautiful golden light that prances and dances behind the flow of the water. (Sometimes it goes out, but it easily re-lit.)

The approach to the Eternal Flame Falls is not super-easy, but it’s not super-difficult either–and it’s better now that the deep descent into the gorge has been tempered by the addition of stairs. It used to be that you had to descend sharply down the wall of the gorge (I’m not sure of the height of the descent, but I think it’s at least a hundred feet at that point) by a root-covered trail, but now you descend the stairs. The walk along the gorge floor is still occasionally tricky, at times even requiring one to step in the stream (albeit in a spot where the depth is very manageable), but it’s absolutely worth it as one finally comes around the last bend and stands before the waterfall.

Along the way there is another waterfall in the side of the gorge, but this isn’t the one we’re here to see:

But finally, there it is:

As luck had it, when I arrived at the Eternal Flame Falls, I was alone there. For a full ten minutes, maybe fifteen, I was entirely alone: just me and the sound of the water tumbling down that shale wall, with the golden light magically flickering there. I don’t know if that’s because the weather was cold, or if it’s deep enough into fall that such outings aren’t as popular as in summer, or…well, who knows. I was alone.

The one other time I’ve gone to the Flame, I had Cane with me, and it was a warm summer day, so there were lots of people there. In fact, Cane and I arrived just as guy was proposing to his girlfriend. (She said yes.) There was a feeling that day of “Get up there and take your picture of the Flame because it’s someone else’s turn in a minute” that I managed to completely avoid yesterday. In fact, no one else came until I was already making my exit. I took my time with my camera, composing my shots and deciding what angles to take. I got some closeups of the grotto with the Flame in it, and I took some wider shots of the entire cataract, also using shutter-priority to get the soft-flow look that is so popular with water photography.

On my way out.

Full Flickr album here.

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Behold the Hunter!

I took Hobbes outside this morning to do his business (he’s still hobbled up, so we can’t just let him out to do his thing in the backyard, we have to actually leash him up and walk him over to where he can pee), and it was about 6:30am, which this time of year is about an hour before sunrise. I glanced about for cars on the street (there were none), and when I looked up at the southern sky, to the left, my jaw dropped.

Orion the Hunter was there, in all his glory, with Canis Major to his right (or my left, as I was looking at him).

Orion has always been my favorite constellation, for various reasons…the winter stars are always so much shinier, for one thing; for another, Orion isn’t a stretch like some constellations are. Orion really looks like a figure of a man, maybe lifting a sword, hanging in the sky. Orion is big, taking up what seems like a full quarter of the sky as I gaze upon him. Looking at Orion I get a sense of mythology and vastness. And I know that Orion’s form contains even more wonders, like the Orion Nebula which is in his belt…and I know that if you follow the path of that belt to the right of Orion, eventually you run into the Pleiades, which are another of the sky’s great wonders.

Orion’s return to the sky always symbolizes to me the deepening of autumn and the coming of winter, and for me, those things are not unwelcome. Welcome back, Hunter! It’s good to see you.

Camera: Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra; processed in Snapseed.

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When the Light is Low….

One area of photography I need to work on–well, I need to work on all of them, but especially this one–is low-light photography. I’ve done some experimenting here and there, and my results haven’t been super-encouraging yet, at least, not until the other night, when I got several shots that were workable. Not really good, but workable. We went to dinner at Lago 210, a restaurant that is right on the Lake Erie shore in Hamburg. The views there are pretty special, but when we got there it was after 7pm, and this time of year that’s well after sunset. Visibility was surprisingly clear, given how crappy the weather lately has been around here, and I could see clearly all the way to the city of Buffalo and I could even make out the lights of the Peace Bridge crossing the water. There were blinking lights of beacons out beyond the water, either on land in Canada or perhaps on buoys out there…I’m not really sure.

One of my main problems with low-light photography will be suppressing my point-and-shoot, get-it-quick instinct. This is something I’m working on anyway, the fact that I need to stop for a moment and compose my shots, but low-light makes it even harder because then I also need to adjust settings and study what I’m doing, and this is all while I’m still…well, I’m still not quite sure how the settings work and how to set up the Exposure Triangle to get a good night-time low-light shot. Also, I need to get more accustomed to using a tripod when doing low-light work, because the long shutter speeds make stability essential.

These first two are looking north-east toward Buffalo, which from Lago 210 is about 9 miles, give or take. Both of these I took right around the same time, so obviously my settings were very different!

Larger versions here and here.

I’m not in love with either of these, but I’ll figure it out. Another factor is my zoom lens, which is harder to manage in terms of settings during zooms. This may be a limitation of my particular camera, being a fixed-lens bridge camera, albeit a very good one. We’ll see, as I move forward. I’m determined, y’all!

Then there was this, which was the first photo I took when we got there, looking out into Lake Erie toward Cleveland, about 180 miles thataway. I’m quite happy with how this turned out, even if there’s still more noise than I would like.

Larger version here.

 

 

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Be open to your mistakes!

What might this be?

That’s a mistake, is what it was. I was trying to take a photo of something and I screwed up the focus.

What was I trying to capture?

This, but close up:

Better luck next time…but I do like the mistake shot! The lens flares look neat to me, even if you can’t really tell what it is we’re even looking at in that shot.

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