From Glum to Glam!
So I was pretty sure when I spotted this little curvy plants on the forest floor that a photo was waiting to be taken, but I was going to have to work to get it. I got down on the ground and played with the settings until I found what worked best, then I manually focused, leaned in slowly – too far! – leaned out slowly, and snapped. And snapped and snapped (the depth of field at 100mm and f/4 is heartbreakingly small when you’re as close to the subject as I was, and I wanted to get this right!). As my hair scraped against the ground, picking up seeds and needles and the flotsam that is spring in the forest, I took a total of eight photos. By the end, my back was killing me and I was covered in orange and gold detritus (thank you, anonymous German trees!).
And all for this:
I admit it: it isn’t very impressive. I’m not sure how much the camera settings affect anything, but I like to joke that I keep everything set to “boring” – low contrast, low saturation, low sharpness, no noise reduction. The only things I want to know is if I blew the highlights and if I clipped the blacks.
But I was happy with this photo, because I knew by just tweaking the white balance a bit toward the cooler edge, increasing the exposure, and increasing the “blacks” of the photo – without touching contrast or saturation or sharpness or the dreaded curves – I could go from the photo above to this:
To get to the final version, I tweaked a lot more – and in fact I started from a Lightroom preset I’d made a while back, so most of the tweaking was done for me and involved lots of highlight recovery and decreased contrast and things I would have never thought to do. In fact, the only things I did after the preset was applied was to clone out the bright part of the leaf on the right edge and decrease (gasp!) the vignette.
And that gets us to this.