Techniques, Tips, Trips, and Musings about my Work

Image 1.

Image 2.

A few weeks ago a friend and I took an early morning hike along the Shenandoah River outside Charles Town, WV. It was a cold, foggy morning. Light along the river was fairly subdued. I was struggling to find inspiration that morning. But as the fog lifted off the river I noticed trees on the far bank began to light up with an orange glow. This amazing light was reflected in the river and contrasted with blue light from the sky. To get this shot I had to slow down the exposure to around 1 to 2 seconds. I used a Heliopan warming polarizer coupled with a Singh-Ray 4-stop neutral density filter on my Zeiss 24-70 lens to help slow down the exposure. The camera was set to ISO 100. I did a few test exposures to find the right combination of time and f-stop. One thing to note is the longer the exposure the more the potential details and color will be lost. To get the right combination of color saturation and blur for this shot required an exposure of 1.5 seconds at f4.

Images were processed in Adobe Lightroom and imported into Photoshop. Once in Photoshop the images were optimized with George DeWolf’s Percep Tool. From here it went through a pre-sharpen routine to tweak out some contrast. Once I was satisfied the image went through a painstaking dodge and burn routine with the History Brush to develop the lights and darks of the reflections. A small adjustment with color finished out the process. I shot about 20 images on the river that morning but Image 1 and 2 are my favorites.

Thanks for stopping by.

Bob