TECHNICAL DETAILS

Sunset View, Centerville, Minnesota, 09 July, 2020
Sony A7iii
Sony Zeiss 16-35 f/4 G OSS
ISO 1600, 16mm, f/9 handheld single image

DYNAMIC RANGE

As someone who practiced in film photography for decades before the advent of digital camera technologies, it still sometimes stuns me the amount of information that a good modern camera can record. Such was the case the other day with this image of Leigh sitting on the edge of our front landing admiring one of the most vivid sunsets we’ve seen recently. It’s a shot that would have been impossible to capture in a single frame of film.

We had just finished cleaning up after a Thursday evening dinner and were settling in to email and social media activities. I was working at my desk, which doesn’t have much of a view of the sky from the narrow corner window. Slowly, it dawned on me that the color of the light coming into the room was quite warm and unusual. I got up to inspect and saw an absolutely stunning sunset evolving. I mentioned it to Leigh, and we went outside to see, initially to our back deck, but then migrating to the front porch, which provided a better view to the west. The sky was remarkable; dramatic orange and yellow hues, with vivid cerulean sky showing through the strongly backlit clouds. It was one of those sunsets that just leaves you speechless. We stood there looking for a while before I decided to run in and grab a camera. I did this with some trepidation for two distinct reasons: 1) I knew that the grandeur and drama would be almost impossible to really capture in an image; and 2) I’m a portraitist, and straight up shots of colorful skies aren’t really my thing. In fact, I usually find them rather uninteresting from a photographic standpoint. But this sunset was special, and I tried to visualize how I could pull a compelling scene together of this marvelous light show, while still pulling in human interest and framing out the unphotogenic aspects of our suburban cul-de-sac.

Leigh, by that time, had sat down on the concrete edge of the front porch, and as I stood behind her taking in the display, it was apparent that I could use the porch and house structure to frame the scene. This would afford a glimpse into the heavenly sunset, while controlling the angle of view and bringing human scale into the scene. With my go-to Sony Zeiss 16-35 on, I wracked the lens all the way out to 16mm and took a very low angle position on my knees behind her, the camera held vertically just an inch or two off the concrete. I wanted both the sky and the framing to be in clear focus, so figured I could get away with the aperture at about f9 to provide sufficient depth of field. The awkward angle and no tripod didn’t make for a stable camera for the shot, but I thought with the Vario-Tessar being a stabilized lens, I could hold 1/100 adequately, so I set that and let the ISO float on auto, resulting in the 1600 used for the exposure. I only shot three frames. Looking at the exposure on the camera back after the first shot, I liked the general composition and sky exposure, but knew I’d be at the very edge of recoverability for the dark foreground and Leigh’s back. The low angle camera position with the 16mm focal length also created some pretty dramatic parallel convergence with the house and the pillar on the left, so overall, I knew I’d have my work cut out for me in post-production.

I’m not a photojournalist, and haven’t been in decades. My use of photography as an artistic medium is rooted in expressing an idea, feeling or vista as my mind conceives it, and I make no pretense of my images representing a ‘reality’ beyond my own. In photographic social media fora, there is much debate about ‘getting it right in camera’ versus using post-processing technologies to ‘correct’ things after pressing the shutter release. For non-journalistic intents, I am clearly 100% in the camp of using every tool available to bring about the artistic manifestation of my concept for the final image. I make no pretext at all about my images representing any ‘reality’ beyond what I see in my mind’s eye. I haven’t the least compunction about deploying such capabilities to bring that vision to the final image. That philosophy is clearly visible in the before-and-after presentation of this image here.

After bringing the RAW file into Adobe Lightroom, I made a number of basic adjustments for color, saturation and contrast, as well as extensive correction of angle of view to compensate for wide angle converging lines. I also used a LUT to map the color space, bringing it back closer to what my eyes perceived during the actual celestial event. I then brought the image into Adobe Photoshop, where I did a fair amount of dodging and burning to accentuate the light and shadows, notably along the stonework of the house and porch pillar, and Leigh’s back. I also applied a subtle Orton effect to punch up the image’s visual impact. The resulting image had some pretty discernible noise, owing to the ISO1600 needed for exposure. I’m a long time user and fan of the Nik Collection plugins, and I used their Dfine noise reduction tools to minimize the noisy areas of the image. The last step was a little selective sharpening using an overlaid high-pass filter and masking. This, too, mostly applied to the rich textures in the stonework, and a little on the back of Leigh’s hair to enhance the detail in the flyaways.

Typically, my portraits have a lot of intentionality in composition and design. I often shoot tethered and am pretty meticulous in planning and building the elements for a final image. This scene didn’t afford that opportunity. Shooting handheld, on the fly, in-camera metering only, and with a rapidly changing sky, I knew I had to make a few quick frames and then attempt to build an image from the resulting data in post. With this image, the technology performed. I had to go on faith that the data was there to recover in the nearly-black parts of the RAW file, and my faith was rewarded with a final image that’s very satisfying to me. It could never have been captured back in the days of shooting chromes. For a spur-of-the-moment shot, I think I’ve gotten more likes from strangers on a couple of photography sites than any image I’ve produced in recent memory! While I don’t judge my photos’ worth by social media activity, it’s clear that this one struck a chord for many viewers.

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