Photographing Fall Colors – Where is the Vividness That I Saw

Many times I've gone out to photograph the beautiful colors that blanket the trees in Fall. My mind and inner vision is completely lit up with these glowing embers that dance in the wind on the trees. At this moment and place nothing seems more wondrous and somehow these colors seems to permeate deep into my collective thoughts where vivid memories live.

You may wonder why the need for all these flowery thoughts. Its because  when I get home, what I see from the camera is nowhere near as spectacular as how I felt at the time. I do shoot in RAW format and I know that this format from the camera tends to be a little muted but even increasing the vibrancy, it still doesn’t come close to the mind's snapshot.

I think that photographing the wondrous colors of fall is actually a hard thing to accomplish if you want to achieve the vision you had at the moment the shutter clicked.

I believe there are 2 main reasons for this.

First is that the reds, oranges and yellow of the leaves are highly saturated & luminous and beyond the ability of the camera's color gamut to capture. The color space of sRGB and Adobe RGB just don’t extend far enough to record these highly saturated and bright colors.

Second the leaves normally have small moments in the wind and they appear to shimmer, thereby giving them the appearance in the mind's memory of being brighter.

When I took the above photograph the yellows on these 2 trees did appear this bright. They glowed in the afternoon sun and were even brighter, almost like a candle flame, but upon reviewing the camera's result it was duller and more greenish-yellow. The image below is from camera with white balance on birch tree set to neutral white 5300K.

You may find my modified version (1st photo) a bit gaudy but it does reflect how I felt about this scene. I darkened the sky to increase contrast between the 2 yellow tees. I also, for the greenish yellow leaves, shifted the hue to be more yellow and then increased lightness and saturation as much as I could and still retain detail. The grass was also darkened and made cooler, more blue-green, to again increase contrast with the yellow tops.

In the photograph below the sun peeked out near sunset just after the rain had gone by and lit up this singular tree. Again the camera made those leaves less bright and more orange. Once again I increased lightness and saturation towards yellow for the bright leaves. I also added a purplish tint to clouds, (complementary color of yellow) to increase color contrast. I extracted the yellow leaves and increased layer size by 10 pixels and then added a slight blur of about 2 and set this layer to overlay. A pseudo Orton effect to give a glowing effect.

In the next image below, the colors, except for a little vibrancy, remain mostly as captured. I did change the sky from a bright blue to a duller and less saturated version with clouds. The original blue negative space was too dominating and took viewers vision away from the tree colors.

Many of the good fall photographs have lots of cooler and darker tones surrounding bright trees that help make those fall colors more prominent within the scene.

If you have good photo-editing tools don't be afraid to play around and change anything to suit your needs and vision. After all, it's how you saw it at least in your mind.

Niels Henriksen

Photographing the Wonders of Fall Colors

In the northern hemisphere at this time of year there is a great transformation going on with our deciduous trees. Over a 2 week period beginning around the last week of September and then into the first 2 weeks of October the leaves start to loose their green photosynthesis properties and with the inherent nutrients left in the leaves, they come forward in brilliant hues of yellow, orange and red.

As the decay of the leaves continues, these brilliant colours fade to duller browns and yellows, but for a short time it is truly wondrous with the brilliant blanket that covers our landscape.

You would think its easy to go out and capture this kaleidoscope of colors. Simply point somewhere. Press the shutter button and instantly record the scene in front of you. It couldn't be easier. Yet when many people return back home and look at their images on the computer they are rare left wondering where the splendour went. This is really a trick with how the mind records the impressions we see. The mind is really like this perfect DOF instrument that seems to blur not important areas and keeps the key points strong and brilliant. The camera does not work this way.

It's best in many situations to think of the fall landscape as an abstract scene. Therefore, for larger vistas, examine the structure and flow of the patterns within this scene. It definitely is important to use compositional elements of lines and patterns formed by the color patterns to create visual interest within photograph.

 

With distant trees, use these colourful features to support other elements in the scene such as mountains, rivers or lakes with reflections. To give visual interest for the larger composition.

In many areas there are still lots of evergreens and the fall colors are only interspersed throughout the evergreen canopy. Therefore, you can also isolate specific patches of colour to give a more dominant interest to a patch of color.

Color can also be used to compliment other cooler colours of greens and blues.

At many times it's mainly the yellows that are dominant and any reds and oranges may be hard to find. Do focus on the yellows but provide other visual interests for viewer's attention. People many times will work.

Since the fall foliage is more like an abstract patchwork, don't forget to add in this abstraction with either camera movement or colorful reflections.

Reflections also provide a unique to isolate the complexity by providing context to a water scene.

The key is to get out and first observe and enjoy the splendour of nature. Try and understand what it is about this scene that intrigues you. Then find a solution with the camera that conveys these feelings in the final photograph.

Do forget other venues with fall and its celebratory events of food.

This image reminds me of Mother Goose and her Chicks.

Niels Henriksen

Capturing the Splendor of Fall Colours

The winners of the Free Print contest are Amuary and Paul and please contact me for details about selecting your print. I sure wish I could give everyone an image but cost prohibits this. I may try in the future to do this again

I would also like to thank all those who participated and provided comments to help me understand about people’s desire to display printed photographic artwork.

The Colours of Fall

In the northern hemisphere and especially those with an abundance of deciduous trees, fall is a spectacular season of colours. To the eyes it’s like an explosion of bright sunlit yellows, oranges and reds that almost seems to overwhelm the senses. As photographers, the desire is strong to capturing these fleeting moments with your camera.


But upon reviewing the captured images they never seem to quite capture what our impressions where. It doesn’t mean that you didn’t capture good images it’s just that the camera records statically the scene, while your eyes actually paint a memory in your brain.

We tend to think that our eyes take in the whole scene before us, but in actual fact it has a narrow angle of view for colour and detail. It very quickly moves about a scene creating an impression of the whole. It is this, if you will, many snapshots of specific elements with each having it’s own vibrancy and focus points that lets you take in the wonder of the whole. It creates a memory that is more vibrant and dynamic.

In a previous article, I wrote about “ What I Saw, My Camera Captured and What My Mind Thought it Saw” ” that provide another example.

For the most part, this fall foliage is akin to splashes of colour on a canvas. It still needs design elements to tie it all together. A classic scene, which is hard to get in my area, is a panorama of overlying rolling hills with maybe just a touch of water, either a lakefront of even better a meandering river. Even mountains will aid this scene. They help by providing lines for the eye to move about the scene and thereby keeping the viewers interest.

In my on case I don’t have these so I find it is better to isolate the few splashes of colour and tie it together with other interesting elements.
In the above image I used the Photoshop Smart-object feature by layering different versions of the same image in Adobe Camera RAW (ACR). Two of these were just to create individual masks for the red and yellow tree. This was achieved by increasing the luminance for the specific colour and reducing for all the rest. This made it easy to find a good mask and with a little curves adjustment and some clean up. I then created a version for each colour that enhanced that colour for its best attributes (red and yellow) and used the masks to make them stand out. Another was used to darken and reduce saturation for the other foliage and a final version for the blue in the water. The reason to use the smart-object feature is like in paintings, a singular colour looks different when combined with other colours. I need to fine-tune the colours to better match the others when composition is complete.


The above scene can easily fool the eyes. Because the duck is low to the water and there are imperfections in the water stillness. You might at first glance think that the horizon line is between the 2 duck images. In fact the horizon line is at the very top edge of the image.

The image below gives a better view of the types of foliage encountered near Ottawa. Lots of evergreens interspersed with colourful deciduous trees. Occasionally, especially near fields, there are pockets of only deciduous trees brightly coloured but it is hard to find grand vistas of fall colours. These pockets, while quite brilliant, mostly don’t have any other elements that will get the viewer to spend time on a scene.


The above image is a simple everyday type image, but there are many elements that keep your gaze moving and thereby spending more time and hopefully enjoying it more. As photographers, that is what we try to achieve with our photographs, viewers spending time on the image.

Below with graphic overlays I have highlighted those elements that aid.
The man’s red toque, red speed sign and red marker buoy from a triangle that aids the vision in moving around the scene and ultimately leads you down the river.

The red circle is a final destination, almost a resting point for the viewer’s gaze. The man in the boat is the strongest contrast and becomes the initial focal point. Its closeness to the red circle helps to draw you in. The Speed sign and the red marker buoy also provide leading lines to the red circle. The green arrows provide diagonal and horizontal lines that re-enforce the moment to central area.



Niels Henriksen

Are the Photographic Print Dead?

The free print contest is still open for the month of September. Please leave a comment with the words ‘free print’ included in your comment. I have included some sample images to give an idea of the range of images available.

The title may be a little tongue-in-cheek, as I know there are still a few places where they are in demand and in some ways this topic seems to go against my desire to give away prints.


The reason I ask this is that I wanted to thank my regular readers of ‘My Camera World’ blog, for consistently dropping by to read my articles and view my images, by giving away 2 professional produced prints as a contest. The threshold was when I first reached the 1,000-subscriber mark.


I was completely bewildered when there were very few regular readers that wanted to take a chance at receiving a print for free.


This goes against my other world (not online) where I do sell a few prints at Art fairs and galleries. 11”x14” prints normally sell from $120-$160. I have even had a few sales on the web-based art sites. I have a set of 10 greeting cards printed on 5x7 stock that are in reasonable demand. I know of 2 people who framed some of these cards as the image goes edge to edge.


So far, if I am correct, most of these sales have been to non-photographers.

So I wonder about the following thoughts I have about my readers:

• Do photographers not like to hang prints by other photographers?
• Are prints only wanted from big name photographers?
• Do photographers not have extra room to hang an image?
• Do my blog readers not like to enter contests?
• Is the cost of framing an image prohibitive?
• Do photographers not like to collect other photographer’s prints?
• Do blog readers not trust free give-aways?

I know many of my readers are photographers and most, if not all, I believe would also like to sell their prints.

I would really like to hear your thoughts, as this is something I just don’t understand and with this discussion we could all help each other better understand the photo print market.

I display and collect other photographer’s photos. Its just plain fun to see the work produced by them. Maybe my kids or grandchildren will benefit the appreciation of value with these photographers.


To have an 11’’ x 14’’ image printed on Epson Ultrafine art paper costs me $51.00 by the professional printmaker I use. I estimate that shipping will run about $15.00. So, as you can see, I was willing to spend up to $130 out of my own pocket just to say thanks. There was really no other motive.


In the article on Pixsylated blog Sly Arena in an article ‘Digital Photographers, Welcome Back to 1999 ’, it discusses the demise of still photography with the greater emergence of video.


If video does become the new dominate form, and I think there is a tendency to go that way especially now that large screen TVs or should we call them integrated home entertainment systems, there will be a greater reliance on this item as the preferred display medium. Being it rotating photos, slideshows or videos the wall screen will slowly replace paper.

Video has been around for a long time but it is only in the last few years that we have the real freedom to choose content, type and time. Before, it was limited to mainstream TV and home film movie buffs.


As always there will be collectors of the old ways. Even today there are a few who still prepare glass negatives, but this is such a small set of individuals. Almost like a lost language or tribe to be studied by others.

In the meantime I still produce images of photo paper and cotton rag for those who appreciate the printed form and I hope there are more who still do and will even take a chance on one of mine.

Thanks for your interest.


Niels Henriksen

Triptych Plus 1, a 4 Photo Vertical Picture

The number 3 is one of the major standards for composition and design elements. In many photographs, 3 similar items will form a triangle when connecting the objects together and this is used to keep the viewer’s gaze moving around the photograph as we go from one item to the next.

In fact there is even a special name for a 3-image photograph or 3-panel painting which is a triptych. But what is when you want to include 4 items as in my 4-image frame below?

The above image framed would be about 5 feet tall and 20 in wide.

On the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend when I took the images for the article The Many Colours of Fall I also took the images used to form the picture frame above.

After I took the image of the 2 people silhouetted against the bright fall foliage I turned sideways and saw this old dead tree, which formed a transition between the green pine trees and the vibrant foliage on the rock face. I did not have any special idea at that time. I only knew that the textures of the dead tree and colours looked great and I decided to take 4 images as I moved from the pond reflection upwards.

This is a close-up section of the 2nd from the top panel to show the great detail in the dead tree.

Each image I composed was a stand-alone image as I figured that one of these would probably turn out to be a real keeper.

It wasn’t until I got home that I realized that combined together, they just might form an interesting multi-image photograph. When combined together in a vertical pattern set the trees do not line up in a standard tree pattern.

The location is more than 100 miles away and with fall foliage just one day can make a great difference in the landscape, let alone the lighting conditions. There was just no way to go back and re-shoot.

There is some advantage in not having perfect alignment as it does compel the viewer to spend a little longer on each image as they move up or down. It also, for a brief moment, causes the viewer to wonder if each image is from the same spot.

This may be a good thing, as they might spend a little longer time viewing and thereby pondering what meaning you are trying to convey, if any.

But I would like the option to see how other alignments work, without having, in my case, to crop the format.

I did try a 4 Horizontal arrangement as shown below.

Then a 3 image horizontal arrangement.

With the set of images I prefer the 3 set better for the horizontal version.

I will print and mat the 4 vertical set and see how this looks before I get a frame made. Sometimes the only way to really understand a photograph is to print and then give yourself time to contemplate the result.



Niels Henriksen

The Many Colours of Fall

I was visiting a good friend for a Thanksgiving weekend (Canadian), which in Ontario is just at the peak of the Fall colours. I brought my camera to get some photos of their grandkids playing around and maybe other images of the other guests celebrating the great friendships we have and of course, then sitting down to one of those great feasts that is spread end to end on large dinning room tables.



The photo has a special meaning for me and maybe that is why I have a particular fondness for this image. I do like the stark silhouettes set against the vibrant and brilliant sunlit fall foliage across the pond. There is just a suggestion of detail, the white stripes and the silver belt work and a small hint of skin tones that give them some depth. The 2 people seem to be gazing out over something. Also the red life jacket seems to add another element and its red colour being in the foreground harmonizes well with the fall colors in the background.

There was a third person in the original photo, but for my own reasons I only wanted these two.

It was a reasonably straightforward process to remove the 3rd person, except for the fact I took a slight detour down the path. Like driving a car, some routes are almost automatic. I at first decided I was going to mask out the person and using the same image below move it to another part of the reflection over the opening and using the transform tool to increase size to better fit the opening.

The 3rd person mask was easy, as it only needed to be slightly larger than the person. Objects like foliage with no clear structure blends well, as you can go over the mask edge to pick more or less from one side to suit the natural lines.

It was then I realized that by inverting the image I could use the original foliage and with a little blurring and sizing work make a perfect fit.


I marked 2 cross-hair style grids on the correct version and at a diagonal to each other to determine if there were any angle corrections needed in the inverted alignment.


The bottom part of the image shows the inverted image and how it was compressed vertically to fit the size of the reflected pond.

The inverted image was set to a blur of 5.9 to match the level of blur in the pond surface. Now the new blurred part matched the removed person cutout, but the colour tones were way too smooth.

When I examined another section of the pond I found that the noise was not just speckled but had short vertical patterns also.

The above pattern was created by creating a new layer and adding noise
Add Noise: 200%
Motion Blur: angle 90; distance 26.
Add Noise: 10%
Add Noise: 125% and fade to 8% as I wanted a little more of a building block texture

This layer was set to overlay and reduced to 4%, which seemed the best match the area beside the masked 3rd person.





The above image shows another angle overlooking the pond and a clue as to what the lifejacket was meant for.


Niels Henriksen

A Photographers Adage


The difficulty with color is to go beyond the fact that it's color – to have it be not just a colorful picture but really be a picture about something. It's difficult. So often color gets caught up in color, and it becomes merly decorative. Some photographers use [ it ] brilliantly to make visual statements combining color and content; otherwise it is empty. -. - Mary Ellen Mark,, Mary Ellen Mark : 25 Years by Marianne Fulton , ISBN: 0821218387 , Page: 5

Hidden Gems in the Open Woods

For a lot of us, when we think of fall photography, we tend to think of those spectacular 2 or maybe even 3 weeks of panoramic rainbows covering the landscape like a painters palette. The enormous abundance of deep, fully saturated reds, oranges and yellows almost burn our brain with what we expect to see when we talk about fall.

When the leaves are just about all scattered on the forest floor, the fall landscape at times can seem pretty dreary but in small pockets can surprise you with unique insight into the forest.

While driving along several blocks of forest early one morning I noticed how the forest floor seemed to glow in the low sun and at the same time create strong shadows of the trees adding texture to the forest bed. I grabbed the camera and headed into the wood area.

The low light was causing the leaf-covered floor to appear alive and the singular trees, now stripped bare of their leaves, were standing as dark sentinels to the last gasp of summer.

Your eyes have the ability to ignore extraneous detail as we gaze about, but the camera sees all and therefore we tend to have too much small-branch detail in the foreground to create a gripping picture.

This happened for me at the edge of the forest, so I decided to walk along some of the paths in the woods to see if there were better vantage points for less cluttered shots. I came upon this tree, which still had the vast majority of its leaves and with the sun almost coming directly from the side, these leaves radiated against the blue cool morning sky.








Through the wooded areas there are many pathways that wind through the area. The image below was taken of a pathway that went along a small ridge. The foot trail seemed very evident while I was standing in the woods. Later as I was reviewing the images, these pathways did not jump out as much as I remembered. That is one of the difficulties with a 2 dimensional object trying to truly reflect what our three-dimensional eyes capture.









With this image, increased the saturation in the fallen leaves was needed as the eye remembers them being more vivid. I then removed some of the colour (saturation) in leaves just on the trail, since these tend to loose some of their colour as people walk along the pathway, naturally. It was necessary to further darken this pathway, as it still wasn’t standing out as much as I remembered. This is partly due to the fact that the camera is not quite able to capture the complete vibrancy of the leaves and therefore the slight muted tones of the pathway are now not as much different in tonal qualities. The image was then cropped to remove some of the trees that did not really add to the scene.








The above file sequence shows some of the enhancements and editing I did to produce the final image.



Further along within a bed of leaves there was this small moss like plant that still had a bit of the morning frost along its edges.





With a lot of landscape scenery and even more so when the forest has completely shed its green canopy, our eyes tend to focus on, and even remember more vividly, those small changes of tones in the forest. This compounded by the fact that our visual absorption is over a period of time and as our memory records these multiple exposures that only capture the best part of the scenery. That is why when we look at our captured images, they never seem quite as bright and vibrant or shimmery.

With the use of photo editing software we are able, with the use of selective techniques, to bring back into the print with some of what the mind retains from our visual journey.

While there may be a need in many images for overall brightness, contrast and colour saturation improvement, it’s by the selective use within the image that our greatest benefits occur. Only by adjusting brightness or reducing tones in those primary elements that can we trick the mind into seeing with the single snapshot, a time elapsed event.

Because film and digital camera are never able to render the full range of tones and colours we see, we can, by reducing these in other areas of our image, make those parts appear brighter in relation to the duller parts. Or if a central object does not jump pout enough we can achieve the same by darkening and reducing saturation with the bordering areas.





Niels Henriksen


A photographer’s Adage

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see. -Dorothea Lange

Fall Colours Up Close and Personal

Last week’s blog dealt with the fall colours on a broader landscape palette, which is how we normally think about fall scenes with its broad expanse and vista of brilliant colours.


There is, just at your doorstep, another set of artist colours to be gathered and painted by the camera.

With landscapes we normally think it is all about Location, L… , as the famous real estate saying goes. With close-up photography the analogy is somewhat the same but it is more about position, position and once again position.

You do not need to trek great distances to find great subjects. Many times these can be gathered in the backyard or near by fields. Depending on the subject you need to position yourself so that the way the light is striking the image best enhances the colourful details or you need to position yourself around the object to find the best background to highlight the and complement subjject.


The image below is fall leaf that is just slightly underwater in a gently moving stream. The slight current and ripples are causing the abstract texture in the object. A polarizer is a definite benefit to remove the sky reflections and bring forth the colours underwater.








In fact for fall colours a polarizer is almost a necessary tool to remove any glare of the leaves.

Even an ordinary weed with just the right background can create a captivating image.

In the photo below I moved around until I found a vibrant colorful background and then used a shallow DOF to ensure that this background was well blurred that almost creates an aurora borealis effect of colour. The background pattern creates a similar hanging downward effect to compliment the flower clusters.









Sometimes even a singular well-textured and abused leaf can create a compelling image. In this image the colours of the tree bark (blue and red tints) is complemented by the bokeh colours of the background, but out-of-focus bark keeps our attention on the leaf.






There is nothing quite a grand as a strong fall reflection in a sunlit still pond. I used the weeds that were in the shadow and the tree truck reflections to frame the image and provide for eye movement around the scene.





















Niels Henriksen



A Photographer's Adage

Color is very much about atmosphere and emotion and the feel of a place. -Alex Webb

The Colours of Fall on the Landscape

This week’s blog deals with the wonderful and exciting colours that paint the landscape during the special 2 week period of Fall, at least for those who will also soon experience of the white of winter.


This image was taken just as the sun was coming up over the horizon on an early thinly frozen pond. The early morning light has caused the rocks to have a bluish tint which compliments the reds and oranges. One day I may decide to clone out the distracting hoar frost which is just catching the sunlight using a upside image.















This scene is captured during the early morning light as the overnight fog is just starting to lift on the river.














The darker pine boughs frame the fall foliage and create an abstract pattern of colour and kight.















In late evening the golden glow of the sun is helping to add a yellow vibrancy to all the leaves on the trees.










In this image the spectacular colours of the leaves in sunlight are bursting through the a whole in the canopy of the forest.



















Niels Henriksen



A Photographer's Adage

A painter works with color as the medium, a photographer works with light. -Carlotta M. Corpron