Blog | Online Photography School

Shooting in the Blue Hour

Wednesday, 27 March 2019 16:10

Written by Joe Baraban

I have always been surprised when someone in either my online class with the BPSOP, or in my “Stretching Your Frame of Mind” workshops I conduct all over our planet asks me what I mean when I say not to forget to shoot in the Blue Hour.

As a result these same photographers will get to a location maybe a few minites before the sun comes up or will pack up when the sun sets (or even sooner) and head for home. All I can tell you out there that you’re missing out on some quality time.

OK, maybe for some of you out there I need to explain exactly what I mean by the Blue Hour, and let’s get the technical stuff out of the way first:

Depending on where you are on our planet and the time of year, the blue hour occurs when the sun is between -6 to -8 degrees below the horizon. During the blue hour the sun is so far below the horizon that only the blue and violet wavelengths are scattered and visible in our sky; while the red and yellow wavelengths pass through into the rest of the universe.

As the sun comes up (golden hour) the blue and violet wavelengths diminish leaving the red yellow and orange to start taking over; this is what’s referred to as dawn. Dawn lasts until the sun breaks the horizon, and at that point it’s sunrise.

Conversely, Sunset (golden hour) is when the sun is nearing or on the horizon, and it’s followed by dusk when there’s no direct sunlight anymore. The red, yellow, and orange wavelengths are fading and the blue and violet are becoming dominant; this is the blue hour…then only darkness.

Btw, blue hour happens even when it’s overcast so don’t pack it in and go home. The length and strength depends on how much cloud cover there is.

I love shooting in the blue hour. It’s moody and magical and can often make up for not so good photos you’ve taken during the day; especially if for some reason you were late for the golden hour.

Since it requires longer exposures and slower shutter speeds, unless you’re using ancillary lighting, you best finish up any portraits before the sun is too far off the horizon.

I like shooting landscapes scenes with structures in them, cityscapes, silhouettes, and anything that has water as one of the main subjects or dominates the foreground. Red and white car lights are great subjects, filled with visual interest and tension.

So, my fellow photographers, next time you go out either go out earlier for the morning blue hour or stay late after the sunset. You’ll thank me for it!!!

-BPSOP Instructor: Joe Baraban

Joe Teaches:

Stretching Your Frame of Mind I

Stretching Your Frame of Mind II

Creating a sense of place: Case Study #12

Tuesday, 12 March 2019 15:35

Written by Brit Hammer

This post is one in a series on how to create a compelling series of images that convey a sense of place and help tell a story.

CASE STUDY: COFFEE-TIME!

Next time you’re taking photos, include detail shots to flesh out your story. Details shots, when added together with photos of people, help show the mood of your scene.

Have a look at the images in this case study:

Sign at the door reading “fully booked, reservations only”
Sign on the wall reading “Coffeeology”
Reserved sign on table
Fork about to dive into a piece of chocolate cake

Do you see how each image tells part of the story? Each of these images is a single idea. By combining several images together, a story can be created.

TIPS TO GREAT DETAIL SHOTS:

Vary the camera angle in each shot. Shoot up, down, out, across, or through a subject.
Frame your subject tightly to omit clutter. Reveal part of the subject.

SIGN UP NOW FOR BRIT’S CLASSES

Amazing Travel Photos Made Easy

Celebrate Your Life in Beautiful Images Part 1

Celebrate Your Life in Beautiful Images Part 2

Photography Essentials

No post processing skills necessary for any of Brit’s courses.

You can also work with Brit privately

Mentoring: Schedule a live session with Brit via Skype

Get a private image video review: Private Video Image Reviews

Find out about all of Brit’s courses, including Photographing Fine Art & Craft

Simplify…

Wednesday, 27 February 2019 13:25

Written by Mark English

Creating strong images is often more about what you choose to exclude from your compositions than what you include. Extraneous objects, distracting bright spots, or other visual detritus rarely add anything to what you are trying to say visually. All elements of your images possess “visual weight”: that tendency for each element to grab and hold your attention. Different elements possess different amounts of visual weight, forming a sort hierarchy of things that grab your attention. Successful images minimize the visual weight of elements in your images that are not part of what you are trying to say photographically allowing those important elements to grab and hold your viewer’s attention. if an element in your image adds nothing to your visual message, it automatically takes away from it. Simplifying your compositions is one of the easiest ways to minimize the visual weight of distractions and strengthen the impact of your images.

A classic example of extraneous objects diluting your compositions is the “tree growing from someone’s head in a group portrait” scenario. Solving this, and other similar problems in composition is simply about being aware of your background and finding a point-of-view that eliminates or at least minimizes the impact of these distracting elements. Solving these problems boils down to recognizing those elements that are important to your visual message and eliminating those that are not.

Begin by identifying what you are trying to say: what you are trying to show the viewer, or what you are trying to make them feel about your subject. This is harder than it sounds, since often your “subject” is not a “thing”; it can also be a mood, a concept, a colour or shape, or the relationships among these.

I came across the image above along the backroads of Tuscany, while scouting for one of my workshops. For me, this wasn’t a landscape so much as it was about the line of the hill punctuated by a row of cypress trees, and the complementary colours of the blue sky and the red clay typical of the Crete Senesi. It was just those elements that were important to me, nothing else; not the winding road just out of frame or the green grass along the ridge of the hill. In a bygone era when we shot film, I would have chosen a high saturation film like Fuji Velvia or Kodak E100SW and underexposed this scene to drop the lower shadow values to near black and saturate the remaining colours. In the digital world it’s better practice to expose for good shadow detail (while being careful not to blow the highlights!) and then drop the shadow detail out in post…. a very simple adjustment in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw. The result is just what I saw in my mind’s eye when I peered through the viewfinder.

The image below is another example of the same concept. This image is not for me a picture of the clock tower in this Italian town, rather it’s about line, shape and colour. Dropping the shadow values here allowed me to remove the distracting detail in the sides of the buildings below the clock tower, leaving strong lines to support the tower against the blue Tuscan sky.

When you can’t eliminate distracting elements by changing your point of view or creative use of exposure, you can at times reduce their impact through selective focus techniques (using longer focal length lenses and/or wider apertures to limit depth-of-field) or perhaps even shooting through something to obscure the distracting elements. In the image below, shooting through some foliage in my backyard and using a macro lens wide-open at f/2.8 eliminated the distractions of tree branches and garden tools in the background.

To quote Jay Maisel, “You are responsible for every square millimeter of what is in your viewfinder”. Understanding what is important to your visual message and eliminating everything that doesn’t add to this will result in simpler more impactful images.

(The next session of my class. “After the Click, refining your vision in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw”, begins March 1^st. Join me to discover how to identify the visual weight relationships in your images and how to refine these in post to clarify your visual message)

-BPSOP Instructor – Mark English

Mark Teaches:

After the Click: Refining Your Vision in Lightroom & Camera Raw

The Art of Printing & Selling Your Art

Are You Over Processing Your Images?

Tuesday, 19 February 2019 09:04

Written by Holly Higbee - Jansen

“Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.” – Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams embraced post-processing in the darkroom by dodging and burning (making adjustments that affect both light and dark areas of the image). The lesson that we learned from him is that post-processing is just as important as actually taking the picture. Ansel Adams would spend entire days locked up in his darkroom creating his masterful prints. They didn’t come out of the camera that way, but he had a vision in mind when he took the picture.

And that is just as true today. When we shoot with care taking into consideration composition, exposure and the histogram of the image, we can effectively create what we saw in digital form. It is also important to think about what kind of post-processing adjustments you might make to the image.

Some of the tools we now use in Lightroom and Photoshop allow us to make creative decisions in order to fulfill the artist’s vision. However, as the photographer goes through the learning process, they start to “see” their images differently, and recognize beginner mistakes that can elevate the quality of their images. This article will point out some of the most common mistakes.

Over Processed Images

The key to learning post-processing in Lightroom is to memorize what all the sliders do and what leeway you will have in using them. You don’t want to overdo a slider and have an adverse effect on your image. Here are a few tips that will help.

Don’t Overdo Your Saturation Slider

One of the most common mistakes a beginner photographer makes when first learning post processing is over saturating their images. It seems that when you spend hours on an image, you don’t actually give yourself the option to really “see” what you have created.
A good rule of thumb is to try the vibrance slider first before adding saturation. Vibrance is a smart-tool which only increases the intensity of the more muted colors and leaves the already well-saturated colors alone. It’s sort of like fill light, but for colors. Vibrance also prevents skin tones from becoming overly saturated and unnatural. Then use your saturation slider sparingly, watching for over-saturation in skin tones as well as blown out reds and greens.

Another tip would be to look away from your image for a few minutes. Look out the window or look at a different image and come back to the original.

One of my favorite features of Lightroom is to use the Snapshot view in the Develop module. This will easily give you a way to create another version of the same picture and compare the two.

The Snapshot

The snapshot view in Lightroom gives you the unique ability to work on an image and save a digital facsimile. Lightroom saves just the image adjustments in the catalog and does not take up any additional disk space. If you would like to create a virtual copy of an image to show up separately in the Lightroom Library module, you can do this as well. The snapshots will only show up for a singular image in the Develop module in Lightroom.

You can save a version in a snapshot and create a whole new image or save just pieces of the previous edit by copying the adjustments and pasting only selective adjustments into the new version. After I have made the new adjustment, I save it as a snapshot and then compare the two. Quite frequently, the version that I thought was the best I could do, looks lackluster next to the newer, more creative version.

Don’t Overdo the Shadow Slider

One of the best ways to edit a landscape image is to bring down the highlights and bring up the shadows in Lightroom. But watch out when using the shadow slider. It can leave your image looking flat if you use too much. This can be a dance between using the shadow, highlight and exposure slider, balancing each so that your image looks its best.

The Dehaze Filter

The dehaze filter is a useful tool that should be used sparingly. This filter can give you a dramatic look in the sky of your landscape image, but if overused, it will affect the sky negatively by adding a strange greenish blue cast. This filter is best used sparingly or with the local adjustment brush so you can control the effect. You can also use a selective filter to add more blues back in the sky by decreasing the color temperature to the cooler blue side and bring back the natural color of the sky.

Over-sharpening

Over-sharpening is one of most common mistakes of the beginning photo editor. Sharpening is essential for a correctly edited digital image, but you need to get a handle on the settings that work for your camera. For my camera, I tend to set my sharpening to about 100, my radius to 1.2-1.4 and my detail to 25. You can push these settings higher, but watch for halos and glows around the edges of the image. Also be careful of sharpening if you have cropped your image. If you are sharpening an image based on the full resolution size, it will easily look over sharpened when cropped.

The highlighted area showing the halo is over sharpened.

In addition to all of these recommendations, over-processed images occur when we get too close to the work and don’t give ourselves some space and time to actually “see” what we have created. Hopefully, the tips suggested and a little dedicated screen break from time to time will help us to stop spoiling the pictures we worked so hard to make.

If you would like some help with your grasp on photo editing, join us at for our next Lightroom Quick Start for an enriching learning experience right here on BPSOP.

In this class, I cover the basic tools to use Lightroom as your go-to editing and organizational tool. This 4-week class covers the basics that will get you up and running quickly in an efficient way. Try our next Lightroom class and learn to use the essential program for editing and organization.

BPSOP Instructor – Holly Higbee-Jansen

Holly Holly Higbee-Jansen is photographer, trainer, blogger, and landscape photography workshop leader who enjoys teaching and the creative process. Her passions include teaching photography workshops in beautiful locations in California, Iceland, Costa Rica and the American West with her husband Mark. Holly also teaches online classes on Lightroom, Photoshop and photographic technique. Get Holly’s Free E-Book on “Landscape Photography and the Light“ and find out about her newest workshops at Jansen Photo Expeditions.com.

Reach Holly by email at hhjphoto@gmail.com and read her blog at JansenPhotoExpeditions.com/Blog

Holly Teaches:

Lightroom Quickstart

Do you want to learn to create images that show the beauty of the scene you saw when you took the photograph? Do you want to learn the other essential side of digital photography, photo editing and get up to speed quickly?

This course is designed to get you up and running FAST in this incredibly powerful program. In this two week information packed class, you will learn how to import, organize and perform simple and effective editing processes that will let you produce beautiful adjustments to your pictures.

iPhone Photography

In this class, we will introduce you to the magic of iPhone photography using several shooting and editing apps that will give you the ability to make your pictures sing in a fun and easy way. You will learn how to crop, change saturation, brightness and affect the overall look of your pictures with HDR, drama and grunge filters and other techniques. You will be amazed at the simple and effective methods.