Ram Island Light
by Harry Lichtman
Was up in the Boothbay area of Maine this weekend more for R&R than photography, but the place sure lends itself to image making. Saw this lighthouse during a bike ride the prior day, did the pre-visualization of what the scene might look like at sunrise, and returned the next day. A pretty sunrise, but nothing too crazy. I think the kayakers ended making the image much more interesting. A 2 image blend was taken at different ISO and shutters speeds to prevent blurring in the FG boats, as the chop and wind moved them around a bit in the low light. I have other shot with some boat movement that give a more impressionist feeling.
Canon 5DII, Canon 100-400 IS
Comments
8 commentsBTW - I know this spot well.
So you see, things can get complicated! The problem I ran into for this image was low light level at sunrise, and moving boats due to the wind and ocean chop. Sunrise usual yields calmer conditions in bays, and you can see that portions of the bay are calmer than other areas. Depth of field is a limiting factor with a long zoom, which I used. Stopping down my lens to its max would have reduced quality and rendered the boats real fuzzy, probably not recognizeable. I used a higher ISO and focused on the boats at f16 and made an exposure, then quickly focused on the kayaker and made another exposure at a lower ISO and f11 to reduce noise but still allow DOF and a shutter speed that would capture the kayakers relatively sharp. Since the background was not moving, that was not an issue, as long as the DOF was great enough. I manually stacked the images in PS then alllowed the sharpes parts of each to show through. I prefer to blend images manually even though it takes longer. I find I get realistic results and the process makes me study the image more and decide if I really think it's worth the time to blend it. So, this image may have been possible in a single shot after cropping a wider angle shot at much higher ISO and smaller aperature, but the quality would not have been nearly as good. I strive for the abiltiy to make large prints for clients if needed, even though they may only end up 3 x 5 inches in a magazine!
I guess the best thing to do is decide what you want the final image to look like, and determine if any blending is needed at all. Then choose your blending tool to achieve it. It forces you to really think about your final image way before you take the shot. Hope that helps and not to wordy
Thanks for the explanation. I'll have to try it some time.
Allen
Peter