Frustration and Breakthrough
Teter Rock
This morning I had big plans to go take some Milky Way pictures, but then my boss intervened. He has been kind of hard core about not letting me go shoot a lot of pictures, and my shutter finger is starting to get kind of itchy. When I retired last fall to do photography, I somehow thought there would be more picture taking involved. I love taking pictures. I like to think I have been getting progressively better at doing so and one has to practice a craft to get better on a consistent basis.
The before picture. What a beautiful sky!
The thing about digital photography is that taking a picture is only the start of the process. Then you have to download the files to a computer, look at them to decide which ones may be keepers, and then process them. It can easily take twice as long in processing to end up with a dozen nice pictures out of a hundred that you have taken. Considering that a camera is capable of taking 5-10 pictures every second in burst mode, you can really pile up some work in a hurry. To this point I have been using Adobe Lightroom as my processing software, and it is a very powerful program that is capable of doing most things you need to do to a photograph. Cropping, straightening, adjusting exposure and color, removing spots, etc is very easy with Lightroom.
Sometimes though, Lightroom has a glaring weakness. When you take a picture of a beautiful blue clear sky, the resulting export will look horrible. The sky ends up just banded colors that in no way resemble what what you shot. I have certainly seen the problem before but it really came home to roost when I started developing my second day shooting in Rocky Mountain National Park back in March. I don’t know if I have shared any of that yet and I have a lot of really nice pictures…that have a totally hosed sky. Frustrating!
From my day 2 pictures of Rocky Mountain National Park in March.
When this happens, you have to go to Lightroom’s big brother, Adobe Photoshop to fix it. And there is the rub. You have to know how to use Photoshop and that is a very complex program. I have only ever been able to use it by finding a particular tutorial on what I wanted to do and follow step by step without really understanding what on earth I was doing. When my Rocky Mountain shoot went awry in processing I found several ways people said to fix the sky but none of them worked very well. I decided to just abandon trying to do anything with that day’s pictures until I got proficient enough to be able to fix them.
Taken from the same spot, different camera. This is the sixth attempt I made to fix that ugly sky. No joy.
I ran into the same thing yesterday when I was reworking my Flint Hills pictures from last summer. Most came out okay, but one picture of Teter Rock had a blown up sky. In reality it isn’t so much a fault of Lightroom as it is what happens when you export a smaller sized version for using online. The file I exported for printing looked okay, but that was a much higher resolution file and much larger in size. Way to big to try using on Facebook or uploading to my website. When they are small size Lightroom has to remove a lot of data to squeeze it down and the sky takes an obvious hit.
This morning…or should I say the middle of this night my alarm went off at 1:00 AM to get me up in time to drive an hour to where I wanted to shoot the Milky Way. There was only a one hour window to shoot in between moon setting and the sun beginning to drown out the stars. I hit the snooze button several times and put myself too late to get there. I could have gone to the local lake and shot, but that was when my boss told me I have to get things I have already shot finished before I get to shoot any more. What a meanie! So instead of leaving to take more pictures I decided to work on the Teter Rock picture and see if I could get it right.
This is the same image as the first one. The first image is from a Photoshop export, this is that image imported into Lightroom and exported again sized for web viewing. It is better, but still not quite right.
Wonder of wonders, the hours I have spent with training videos on Photoshop seem to be having an effect! I actually was able to make this picture come out right without once having to refer to either Help or review any training. That is a huge breakthrough for me. It isn’t perfect, but at least I did something on my own with my developed skills and that feels really good. Made my boss happy too.
