Photographing a Gorge in Autumn
Difficult Subjects Need Photoshop To Produce The Best Photos
May 13, 2008
In parts of the world where the four seasons reign, autumn is a favorite time of year for photographers. The harsh direct summer sun gives way to a gentler, lower sun. With the sun taking a lower path through the sky, it offers far more side lighting, and although the hours of daylight might be shorter there is actually more useable time for photographers. In autumn, the golden and red colors of leaves on deciduous trees can appear quite magical with this side lighting.
The shadows from the side lighting while enhancing the impression of depth and surface textures can provide problems when there are large dark areas and this may hide detail. The Cataract Gorge in Launceston, Tasmania, is one example where these contradictions are very much to the fore.
The South Esk River cuts a deep gorge through the hills just before it joins it sister, the North Esk, to form the Tamar River. At one point, the steep sides of the gorge open out to form a basin that is within easy walking distance of the city center.
There are a variety of scenic walking paths, bridges and other amenities including places to eat and relax while taking in the many views. For a bird’s eye view, the longest single span chairlift in the world crosses this area of the Cataract Gorge, known as the First Basin.
Unfortunately, the Gorge rarely lives up to its name, since the damming of the South Esk River to supply water for a hydroelectric power station. The wild water now only comes when upstream dam overflows after heavy winter rain. This presents a typical Tasmanian conundrum: the loss of a wild river weighed against the production of electricity without producing greenhouse gases or smoke pollution. The Tamar River valley around Launceston is notorious for holding layers of smoke pollution during winter, so clean power generation is particularly important to the city. The clean air also helps produce sharp crisp images.
First Basin, Cataract George: Fig. 1
The first image gives an overview of some of the First Basin, including the chairlift and swimming pool. The evergreen native trees provide a backdrop for the imported deciduous trees planted by homesick European settlers. The many paths provide good shooting platforms from varying elevations. The angle of the sun caused some problems with flare in this location, using one hand as an additional lens shade is an easy solution. If the edge of the hand appears in the corner of the image, remove it using the clone tool in Photoshop.
Fig. 2
The photo of the rotunda typifies the range of light conditions from the deep shadow of the foreground to the very bright areas in full sun. The light reflecting off and shining through the variety of leaf types provides detail and interest as well as framing the old bandstand. The wide range of exposure required to capture the bright parts while still capturing details in the shadows challenges any automatic metering system. Using the spot metering mode on a dark area, combined with 1.3 stops of exposure compensation, captured the darker areas, while careful composition limited the bright spots to avoid over exposing the highlights.
Fig. 3
This view down the Cataract Gorge proved too much of a challenge for metering techniques alone. The low autumn sun shining through the leaves of the tree by the bridge is very bright and needs careful metering to limit losing detail in the highlights. This contrasts with the deep shadow area of the cliff face in the background. This range of light levels is difficult for current digital cameras to accommodate. The human eye automatically adjusts for the varying light levels in this scene and the brain builds a composite impression of the view.
This is where Photoshop rescues the image to recreate our impression of the scene. Bibble software created a working TIFF image from the original RAW image. Using the magic lasso tool in Adobe Photoshop CS2 to select the dark area of the cliff face limited the scope of a levels adjustment to that area. This brought out some of the details in the dark cliff face while leaving the correctly exposed sections untouched.
A neutral density filter also helps to compensate for situations with wide ranges of exposure. They work best however where the divides between light and dark are of amore horizontal nature. In this instance, there are different areas side by side as well.
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