About ten years ago, Jack Wasserbach showed me some graffiti-covered abandoned buildings at Fort Ord. I took pictures, but nothing grabbed me when I went over the images in Lightroom. Yesterday I got the idea of doing some composites.              

In the last post, I talked about specularity. If you haven’t read that post, it would enhance your understanding of this one if you took a look at it now. Although I mentioned the light source as a component of specularity, all the examples I posted related to changing the object in front of the… [Read More]

In the last three posts I’ve dealt with photographic subjects that have some degree of specularity. It occurs to me that some readers may not understand the concept well, and if they do understand it, they may not be able to relate the concept to their photography. Hence this post. In general English, specularity is… [Read More]

Here’s the scene, photographed with a Hasselblad X2D, 90mm XCD lens, and developed in Lightroom with default settings. Here’s the raw histogram, log-log presentation: Looks like it’s ETTR, but maybe too conservative. Here’s the raw histogram with a linear y-axis: That makes it look a stop or so underexposed from ETTR. Here’s the in-camera histogram:… [Read More]

In the previous post, I looked at in-camera, raw, and developed histograms for a normal-contrast scene. We saw that deciding on the correct exposure required consideration of how much specular and near-specular highlights should be protected. For this post, I wanted a low-contrast scene. I got one, but there’s a specular highlight that I didn’t… [Read More]