Perfect Christmas Tree, A Squirrel Saga

Gazebo in the Rain : 2016

Keene New Hampshire is most notable for two physical attributes.  The first is its wide and vibrant Main Street and the second is its classic Central Square at the head of that street.  The square is complete with a beautiful gazebo, the ubiquitous Civil War Statue and the towering steeple of the historic white church.  For a photographer, Central Square is the exclamation point on this lovely New England town.  For me the square is at its best with the addition of the holiday lighting, including the majestic beauty of a brightly illuminated Christmas tree.

Tree at the Head of the Square

2013 Perfect Central Square

Every year I become excited to see the tree at the head of the square.  The trees are always obtained locally and although they vary in size and in the care given to the lighting, I always try to capture the display to best advantage.  The tree has been my focus in several articles discussing photography of holiday lights, and at its best the combination of the glowing evergreen with the perfect New England setting can be breathtaking.  But this year there was a problem.

• Getting the Most from Christmas Lights Photography
• Christmas Light Photography (NEPG Article)

A Beautiful Tree

2007 Tree with
"Winter Wonderland" Coating

This year’s tree is the best I have seen since the magnificent tree of 2007.  It is tall and full without any major defects or holes.  There has been no snow yet to coat the tree in a “Winter Wonderland” blanket, but everything looked very promising when I first viewed the tree in the daylight.

Holes

Holes

When I came back to view the tree at night, with the full show of the colored lights, I was horrified.  The beautiful tree was missing lights on a major portion of the top.  At its peak, the  brilliant white star was floating above a large patch of empty branches.

I called City Hall to politely inquire about this tragic insult to an otherwise epic tree, but at first I received on answer.  I couldn’t believe that I was the only person to notice the problem.  That night I went into town for my first attempt at shooting the crippled tree.   

 

As if to add further insult, it was raining.  The scene had nearly every dismal condition that ever detracted from holiday light photography.   No snow, black sky, missing lights, and droplets on my lens.  All I could do was try to find angles which took advantage of the colorful reflections.  At Least the reflections didn’t show the gaping hole in the lights.  I had hopes that the lights would eventually be repaired, but, in the meantime, I went home and got to work.

Photoshop to the Rescue

Magic Restored with Photoshop

A perfectly illuminated Christmas tree is magical, and what is even more magical is the ability of Photoshop to rescue a poor tree and promote it to its deserved brilliance.  As it happens it is not especially difficult to add lights to fill the holes in a tree.  I cloned individual and strings of lights with ease.  The challenge was to match the illumination of the surrounding greenery.  I approached the rest of the image in steps.  Since I already planned to throw authenticity out the window, I also used cloning and content-aware fill to remove the street lights, the support wires and a few of the most obvious smears of light from passing vehicles.  I left the fire hydrant as a sad false suggestion of reality. 

The final image did not have the full “Winter Wonderland” magic, but, until the snow flies, it was the best I could do with the conditions.  At least the reflections added a point of special interest.  I thought the image would at least serve as a way of shaming the city about its negligent short changing of the beautiful tree that had given its life for our enjoyment.  Then the phone rang and I realize my mistake.

City to the Rescue

All Natural and the Blue Hour!

The next day I received a call from a lovely person at city hall.  Helen told me that they had noticed the problem and discovered that squirrels had eaten through the wires on several strands of the lights.  She assured me that the fire department would be scaling the tree to add new lights, and later that day it was done.  I didn’t ask who first noticed the problem and therefore I can feel comfortable taking full credit for the repair. As it turned out, all I had to do was wait a day, but it still was a fun exercise to use Photoshop to fill the tree.

I came back the next evening to photograph the fully illuminated tree and was also able to capture the square bathed in the cool blue hour light.  The only thing missing was a fresh coating of snow.  I can wait for nature to provide.  I promise, I will not try to Photoshop in the snow! 

Even I have limits.

 Jeff Newcomer

partridgebrookreflections.com

603-363-8338

Keene Main Street – One & Done

Keene Central Square

All Are Welcome

In last week’s Blog I discussed the value of exploring a location from many different angles.  As I have become familiar with the  broad spectrum of photographic techniques my approach has evolved, often with multiple images to optimize focus and exposure, and, often,  at the expense of the time required to look for other opportunities.

 

One an Done Experiment

May Sale

As an experiment I took a stroll down Keene’s classic Main Street and as a simple exercise, I forced myself to explore new angles, and to capture only one shot per composition.  No tripod, no multi-image focus stakes or multi-exposure HDR.   

 

I arranged the composition, adjusted focus point, f stop and shutter for optimal sharpness and then clicked. I allowed myself a second shot only if I guessed wrong on the exposure.  It was wonderfully liberating and great fun.  In just about 20 minutes I came home with just 71 shots on my memory card,  resulting in  17 unique images.  They are not all “hero” shots, but overall, I learned a lot From my quick photo walk.  

A Shorter Blog

I usually don’t feel that I must apologize for a short blog.  They appear to be a rare and welcomed relief from my standard volumes. For this week’s article, I would have normally rambled on about the value refreshing your photographic vision and the limitations of spending too much time on the technical aspects of just a few  image.  I covered much of this last week and this week I am more than just a little limited.  

 

The Hip Has It

Canon Ball Square

Last Monday I underwent a total hip replacement at Concord Hospital.  I had been limited by pain and stiffness in my left hip for a few years.  I could deal with the pain, but the hip was keeping me from doing what I wanted to do, especially when it came to getting out to photograph in more difficult or remote locations.  The time had come.

Dr. Fox did an admirable job and I was home the day after the surgery, but I have a lot of difficult work to do.  I hope that by the autumn I will be more mobile.  This week has been tough and I have had little time or energy to blog.  I suspect that will be true for several weeks and I certainly will not have any new shoots to recount.

Gazebo Time

 

Now Hiring : Naked Woman (#3)

 Here then without prolonged comment are the images from my Main Street photo shoot.  They are largely self-explanatory.  I am happy that I finally have an actual “naked woman”, sort of, partially, to allow me to boost my traffic by mentioning the phase “naked woman” , three times!

Main Street Stroll

Enjoy Keene New Hampshire’s Main Street and excuse me if the next few blogs are excessively brief or late.  Hopefully I will be able to get out before the summer is gone.

Jeffrey Newcomer

Partridgebrookreflections.com

 

White Balance, The Basics of Digital Photography

  
Taking the Light's Temperature
 
Photography always comes back to the light and the color of the light that illuminates our subjects exerts a profound effect on the resulting image. Visible light can vary from the orange of candle flame to the deep blue of the evening sky, but he human eye has a remarkable ability to compensate for this wide spectrum. We can recognize a white card as being white through a broad color range, but our digital cameras lack our cognitive abilities to interpret visual input. Without correction, a white object captured in the yellow light of an incandescent bulb will be recorded with a yellow tint and the blue sky, illuminating someone in the shade of a building will change the face to a cold sickly blue. Digital cameras offer auto white balance settings (AWB) , using various algorithms to compensate for changes in the color of light, but, as is true of most automatic settings, the adjustments often don't produce the best results. This is one of those situations where the computer in your brain can work better that your camera's microprocessor, so its time to get to work.

Your Light Has a Temperature

Specturm of Light
http://www.exposureguide.com/white-balance.htm

Most digital cameras have white balance settings to adjust for a number of the common colors of illumination. These may work better than the Camera's auto white balance, but the balance is fixed and won't change with changing light. Fortunately a glance at the camera's LCD screen can provide quick feedback about the effect of any selection. The common presets include:

 
Sunlight:
Unfiltered sunlight contains the full spectrum of visible light and as a result tends to produce the most accurate white and color reproduction. This is a good setting when shooting outside in full sunlight, but who actually does that?

Cloudy and Shade:
In both of these situations the light tends to be cooler, as the full

Abigail in Full Shade

spectrum is filtered through blue clouds or comes into shaded areas from the even bluer sky. Cloudy and Shade settings compensate by warming the image. The Cloudy setting provides enough warming to balance the cooling effect that occurs when sunlight is scattered and filtered through the overcast. The Shade setting provides a warmer adjustment for times when the subject is illuminated by the more intense bright blue dome of the sky. It is important to be aware that, when shooting in the shade, areas outside of your main subject that are in the bright sunlight may take on an unnatural orange tint.

Tungsten:
Indoor illumination from Tungsten light bulbs has a strong yellow

Tungsten Color Balance

hue and the Tungsten setting is used to cool down the digital image by adding blue. A good way to appreciate this effect is to shoot outside in sunlight with the Tungsten WB setting. This will reinforce the importance of readjusting the white balance when you going from inside to outdoors. Last

Kissing Bridge Tungsten WB

week I used the tungsten setting while shooting inside the Vermont Country Store. When I ventured outside, I forgot to readjust the WB and the first couple images of the "Kissing Bridge" had an intensely blue tint. This blue shift is also seen when windows to the outside are included in my indoor photography. Situations like this, when there is a mosaic of different colored light, can be challenging and is where local adjustments of color balance in Photoshop can be a life-saver.

 
Fluorescent:
Fluorescent lighting has a blue/green shade which is warmed using the Fluorescent setting. The color of fluorescent can vary a good deal and it can take experimentation to find the best WB setting.

Flash WB

Flash:
The light from most flash units tends to most closely approximate sunlight, but can be a bit cool. The flash setting usually tends to slightly warm the image.

 






Custom White Balance:
The fixed white balance adjustments can provide a good approximation of the correct setting for specific lighting, but they are often imperfect. Some cameras allow fine tuning of the color compensation, but the use of Custom White Balance can be the easiest way to nail the precise adjustment. This option is available on many digital cameras.

Incandescent Light
and Tungsten White Balance

Custom White Balance starts with taking a picture of a white or neutral gray card in the same light that is falling on your subject. These cards are available on-line or at your local camera store (remember those?). A clean white piece of paper or anything else which is pure white can serve. I have a card with white on one side and gray on the other. The details vary, but on my Canon 5D II, I display the picture of my white card,

Custom White Balance

which has been exposed in the correct light and positioned in the center of the frame. Then I select "Custom White Balance" from
my camera's menu. I tell the camera to use the current image as the basis for custom white balance and then, any time I select "Custom" for the white balance option, the white balance will return to this setting. Custom white balance is helpful whenever precise control of color is necessary, such as in product photography. Your client will not appreciate getting the color wrong on the Campbell Soup can. 



 


 

Shoot RAW! 
All of this fuss about white balance is especially important if you are shooting in JPEG rather than RAW. Need I say that this is just one more reason that you should shoot in RAW? In-camera white balance settings are of little importance when shooting RAW since all of the color information is preserved in the RAW image. Regardless of the original setting, the white balance can be adjusted in post-processing without any loss of quality. Unfortunately, when shooting in JPEG, white balance is baked into the image file with the loss of a significant amount of color data.






 
 To demonstrate this, I intentionally shot Chesterfield's historic town hall with the white balance incorrectly set to tungsten. I captured the image in both RAW and in the highest quality JPEG and then tried to salvage the images to accurately reflect the overcast lighting. There was no problem readjusting the RAW color balance, but, despite doing everything I could in Lightroom and Photoshop the JPEG image's color remained disappointingly flat and dull. 




As can be seen, post-processing color balance adjustments on JPEG files are difficult and result in a poor quality image. If for some totally unfathomable reason you are still shooting in JPEG, there are two things to remember.

• First, don't.   
• Secondly, if you do, careful adjustment of white balance in the camera is essential. You really won't get a second chance.

So, when shooting RAW is there any reason to set a specific white balance? I generally keep my camera on Auto White Balance. In most situations this works well as a starting point and then I almost always tweak the color in post. In a few situations such as portraiture or product photography strict color accuracy is important, but for most of my work, precise color matching is not necessary or even desirable. When I am shooting in the golden evening light the last thing I want is for whites to appear pure white. If I used custom white balance from a white card, I would loose all the warmth of the scene. Occasionally I will use the cloudy or shade settings to more accurately reflect the warmth of the "Golden Hours", although when shooting in RAW I can make the same adjustment in post. In post processing I am looking for the colors that best reflect the appearance and feel of the moment. 

 


A Fixed White Balance
There are occasional instances when setting a specific fixed white balance can be helpful. Last week I had a great time shooting in the

Country Store Light

Vermont Country Store. The lighting came uniformly from incandescent bulbs and, by setting the camera to Tungsten White Balance, all of the images had a consistent white balance adjustment. The color wasn't precisely what I wanted, it was still a bit yellow for my taste, but, because all of the images started with the same color balance, I was able to batch all of the images together and make a single adjust which worked pretty well for all of them. Because in AWB the white balance changes from image to image, a single adjustment would not have worked as well for all of the images. Shooting in Tungsten WB ended up saving time that would have been spent performing subtle tweaks to many of the images.



Of course Photoshop and Lightroom have powerful tools to adjust

Cloudy WB

white balance in the digital darkroom, but that should be a topic for a future blog. For now it is important to understand how the camera sees color balance differently from our remarkable eyes and how color balance settings help to compensate for this difference. This is the time to settle back with your manual (if you can find it) and learn about how your camera adjusts white balance. Keep your eye on that LCD screen and experiment your brains out. Getting color balance right is especially important when shooting JPEG, but whether recording JPEG or RAW files it all comes down to Getting Color Balance Right in the Digital Camera.

Jeff Newcomer
Partridgebrookreflections.com