Finally had a little break from dance photos to look back and some images that I may put into the portfolio. The winter evenings also brought some opportunities to go out and get some photos of the capitol city. During this evening, I took my gear out to the Tidal Basin. I do not normally visit this area unless it is bursting with cherry blossoms! It is probably one of the most photographed areas in DC during those few early Spring days, but on a week night evening, all the traffic is on the surrounding streets and bridges with commuters heading home for the day.
The parking lots are very accessible during this time, and there is not too much foot traffic around the basin. This gives clear vantages to the Jefferson Memorial, the Washington Monument, and even the White House. The fading light will also give you streaks of lights from air traffic going in or out of Reagan National Airport, and there is a faint glow from the traffic and building lights from across the Potomac River. It is a peaceful time if you are there for photos, and not in your car just trying to get home.
At the end of 2013, I looked back, and I realized that I kept a resolution that I stipulated a year prior to blog at least once a day. To say that I learned a lot would be an understatement of a large degree. I was thinking so much more about why I do things, I sought the opinions of other bloggers and what they wanted to accomplish with their writing. With my focus on photography, I had lots of content that I had not written about as these events and projects were progressing. I thought that I would need to dip into that pool of projects to keep going when new ideas or images were not made throughout the year. In fact, I still have a list of things that I have not blogged about event after a year of daily postings.
There are a few content makers out there that really crank out posts multiple times a day. I knew that I could not do that being just one person. When would I have time to make new photos? There are many photographers, writers, comedians, sports reporters, that blog articles daily. It took me a while to see what they were doing, and to jump in myself. This was despite the fact that I would read their content multiple times a day. I knew I had some things to contribute, and I had a WordPress blog already setup. It was only the commitment that was needed to really get the ball rolling. It is now a part of daily routine. If it is getting late in the afternoon, I feel the tug of the keyboard to get something down. It is as much for me as for anyone else that happens to come across the site.
For everyone that has come across my posts and written comments and urged me to continue – Thank you! To all the writers, photographers, podcasters, and other content creators that are sharing their creations online with their audiences – Thank you! I hope that I can contribute more than noise to the online community. I love creating and sharing new images that hopefully get better as I write and analyze the photos over time. And it is my hope to make them better each time I hit the “Publish” button.
With all my landscape images, I have been bracketing exposures with the intent to do some post processing on the photos and create a high dynamic range (HDR) final image. One evening, I walked out on the Virginia side of the Potomac River from Washington, DC to the Memorial Bridge. This is a beautiful spot to make images of the Lincoln and Washington Monuments especially in the early evening. With the sun lowering, the white buildings again take on that pink/orange hue of the fading light.
In looking through the set of images that I made after the shoot, I did notice that this night had a smoggy haze. With rush hour traffic starting to build, it did not make for as nice a scene as the crisp winter mornings. The haze came in the middle of the frames underneath the blue, and stayed over the pink part of the sky overlaying this ugly gray layer.
This was just bad luck for the time I happened to be out there shooting. Obviously, it makes me want to try this on a different day. Perhaps I can get a better result next time. In any case, I saw the result from the post processing the bracketed photos with Photomatix. I wanted to compare it to the RAW file images. With this in mind, I had a feeling that being able to shoot at a low ISO. Additionally, with all the detail and information that the Nikon D4 gathers, I could make one of the RAW files that was in the middle of the bracket look just as good as the HDR image.
What I learned in looking at these photos, is that there is not a huge difference between the dark and light sections of the photo. Moreover it is very possible to make one exposure similar to a realistic HDR image from 7 bracketed photos. The Raw file was adjusted in Adobe Lightroom with just some contrast, clarity, and vibrance added to the original file.
I then adjusted the white balance of the scene to mimic the HDR, and these photos looked very similar. Although it is not something that I am comfortable yet pre-visualizing. So it is nice to have the bracketed photos as a backup. I will probably continue to shoot both ways, and processes them in 2 ways, until I can more easily predict when it will save me a lot of time and memory card space to shoot just one photo instead of the whole series.
