High Contrast Images Under Construction

I had a conversation with a gallery owner named Ruth the other day. She and I have both been around photograpy for a long time now, and we each had some of our old stories of "back in the days." Now don't worry, this isn't going to turn into a monologue about how when we were kids in order to get to school we had to walk five miles through the snow carrying our desks.

I remember the old days before digital. You could do all sorts of special effects back then. They had tools like rubylith, and register pins, and internegatives, and lithographic film. The trouble was, most of these tools were too time consuming and hard to use, so most people didn't use them.

Today, digital cameras are easy to use, and instead of shooting 36 or 72 shots at the homecoming game, you can shoot 900. When the cops went from six shooter revolvers to autoloaders with 18 round magazines, it gave the good guys more firepower in a gunfight, but departments quickly learned that the "spray and pray" mindset was dangerous.

The exact same thing is true in digital photography. "Spray and pray" doesn't work if you don't grasp a technical barrier in front of you. In the case of the two photos above, the technical barrier is high dynamic range. Even if we expose for the blue sky and let the let the silouettes go completely black, the details on the sunlit ground end up being too dark to make a good print. Why? Because a .jpg has really limited dynamic range. But there's an easy solution. By switching my exposure quality from .jpg to .raw, I picked up enough dynamic range to get the foreground look I wanted in the shots. I then took the .raw image and opened it up in PhotoShop's camera raw converter. I open a normal version of the file, which was properly exposed by metering off the blue sky when I shot the image. After that, Iopened up a second vesion of the .raw file, tweaking the contrast settings in the camera raw editor to get the light I wanted in the foreground areas. It was then a simple matter to sandwich the two versions of the same .raw file on top of one another in photoshop, and mask away the washed out sky using a layer mask (which is actually a tool that's been around since before photoshop was born.) To make a layer mask back in the old days, you had to spend hours using an x-acto knife and a sheet of rubylith, so nobody did it. Now it's easier, but you'll only find the solution to the problem if you're inquisitive enough to realize there are times when shooting more .jpg's won't solve the problem, and you need to get out of "spray and pray" mode to find the answer.