Sky with people!

People at the Park

I tend to be hesitate to take photographs of strangers. I'm not a people person and I never know how people will react if/when they see my camera pointed in their direction. Luckily, most people seem to assume that I'm with a local newspaper thus far so I haven't had any incidents with paranoids. This particular shot was taken on the wide angle of the particular lens in order to encompass the growing crowd underneath the sky. I think that it distorts the perspective sufficiently to give the impression of a large sky miles overhead. I took it lying down on our blanket and framed it with another blanket leading the eye into the frame. Of course, I'm not sure that I could have framed it without that blanket corner in the frame.

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More Sky

Evening Sky

Another photograph of the evening sky over Barnett Park from this past Saturday. I tried to get some "evening" color in it, but the sky didn't light up with the reds and oranges I really wanted. Still, it was a beautiful sky that evening. I wanted to get a bit of foreground into the image as well, which is why the tops of some trees are visible. However, being right downtown there was a lot of junk I had to screen out. Thus, I'm not really sure if these trees add anything to composition or are just a distraction.

A little off-topic question. Would any of you readers be interested in reading more technical information here? For example, after yesterday's post I got to thinking about a post explaining the camera's histogram(s) and highlight warning displays. The reason that I haven't done so thus far is that I thought there were already numerous blogs and sites with that sort of information around. However, my style tends to be a bit more conversational, so I hope that I could simplify some of the more arcane features of our cameras and software. Any thoughts about that? Good idea? Bad idea? Let me know in the comments.

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Shooting the sky again

Sky over Spartanburg

We had such a nice sky while out at Barnett Park on Saturday, that I took lots of photographs of it. Like textures, they can be used as layers in Photoshop to provide a textured appearance to an image. They can also be used to replace "bad skies" in otherwise good images. Or, they can just be nice too look at by themselves. The trick to shooting the sky is to pay attention to your highlight warning / histogram to make sure that you are not over exposure large areas or areas of important detail. Under exposure, negative exposure compensation, etc. are generally necessary here. Slight to moderate under exposure tends to saturate the colors in the sky quite nicely. Again, pay attention to your histogram to make certain that you do not completely under expose the sky and loose import details.

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