Waiting for the photo
There are times when I’m out taking photos that I can feel that the one I want is about to happen. This is usually felt after arriving at a spot and walking around to get a sense of the space. I usually snap a few photos on my phone as I get ready to bring out the “real” camera. I continue trying some different angles till I find the shots I want here. Once I find it, I wait. I’ll snap a few shots to see how things are changing.
It all depends on the type of photos I’m going for. With long exposures, I have to be pretty certain I’ve got the angle because I usually take 30 second exposures. Then the camera takes about as long or longer to process the photo. Ideally, I’ll snap a few 2-5 second exposures to get a feel for how the elements are moving/working. Sometimes I don’t even go any longer than that because I don’t think things would look better with longer exposures.
I decided to shoot this panorama without a tripod due to the spot I was shooting from. This can mess up the stitching later but I managed to keep my body level as I turned to get the full view. There are definitely times when I have felt the camera dip as I turn and I just stop cause I know its ruined. Sometimes one of those images can be used to be stand alone shots but not always.
Lake Karakul - Xinjiang, China
The camera is most likely to dip when I’m shooting with my 70-200mm lens like I was for the final panorama. Which is when I do miss using the tripod but I like the challenge! I decided to also shoot this as an HDR, so it was three times the number of shots. Which has its on issues cause sometimes I’ll have my exposure too high at the start and then there’s drag cause I’m exposing for longer than I’m expecting. But I knew it’d be worth it for this shot. I didn’t think a regular exposure would get much details in the shadows if I exposed for the sky and vice versa.
After my test panorama, I saw that the fog just under the ridge was catching some sunlight and changing colors. Which is what I had been waiting/hoping for. While I liked the initial view, it was just about to get better with those elements changing. I did decide to wait longer to see if I’d get even more color further down the valley but nothing really happened. Which didn’t bother me cause I had already gotten what I wanted.
The edit was a bit troublesome at first. Processing 24 images that are each 25mb each really taxed my computer. I ended up having to delete some software and a game I hadn’t played in a while. Sorry Total War: 3 Kingdoms but I needed that 40ish gb of space. As Lightroom processed the panorama, I watched my available disc space go from 80gb to under 30gb. Which was much easier than before when I’d have to stitch it together in Photoshop and hope that it didn’t crash my computer. The built in process in Lightroom Classic is such a great change in my workflow. I love panoramas but they used to be so daunting to edit that I just took them and rarely edited them.
I’ve really started to love the masks in Lightroom Classic when editing landscapes. And I hadn’t even downloaded the June 2022 update that made masks even better in Lightroom Classic! Oh well, I guess I need to watch more Matt K videos when the come out! I ended up not doing too much to this panorama. I enhanced a few areas and then went into Photoshop to remove some distractions and add a few luminosity masks. However, as Lightroom Classic gets better and better, I’m using Photoshop less and less. At the same time, I’m reminded of some advice Joel Grimes gives in one of his editing workshops. To paraphrase, he compares software to tools in a toolbox. Sometimes you need a specific tool for a specific task but other times you don’t need to use that tool. This has been great for me in thinking through how I edit. In the past, I would try everything I had learned on every photo I edited. Which really bogged down my work. Not to mention it tended to make me dislike photos if they didn’t fit my editing style. Now I am more keen to edit less and trust my work. All aspects of it.
