Italy

You can buy pearls on Rialto Bridge

Nice Pearl Shop on top of the Rialto Bridge in Venice.

We didn’t buy any pearls when we were on Rialto Bridge. We were far too busy shooting photos. Half the bridge was under reconstruction, but we still managed to get some great shots. One of the things I like, about shooting in Italy at famous locations, is that there usually is a band playing some music. People are in general friendly and happy, and moving around with selfie sticks, trying to shoot themselves with their loved ones. I wouldn’t dare to put any of my cameras on a selfie stick though!

These are a couple of my favorites from same evening:

Working with the White Balance in City Night Photography

Castle of the Holy Angel seen from Ponte Sant’ Angelo.

Castel Sant’Angelo or in English Castle of the Holy Angel, was the Mausoleum of Hadrian, Emporer of Rome in the second century. It sits by the river of Tiber. It leaves one with a massive impression, not because it’s particularly beautiful, because it isn’t, but yet, it fascinates. It used to be the tallest building in Rome.

Shooting photos in Rome at night, is great fun, but also a big problem when you start post processing the photos. The city lights are VERY yellow, even when you are on location and looking at it. When we walked around and shot photos along the River of Tiber, I just knew that colors would be a problem. This is not the first time I have encountered such yellow city lights. I also experienced it Rothenburg ob der Tauber in Germany. They use some kind of LED lamps, with a very yellow glow.

The problem with yellow lamps is that you don’t really get a lot of colors reflected back. Think back to the old days with a dark room. The red light bulb made a white piece of paper seem complete red, even if you knew it was white. The same thing happens with a yellow lamp. The light almost only has yellow colors in it, and the only colors they really reflect is yellow. It’s a strange concept the first time you run into it. A surface can only return, the colors that the light source contains.

Once I heard a question ‘what color is the Moon really?’ and the answer got very complex, exactly because of the colors the light contains, and that different colors have different wavelengths.

In my world, the color of light is less complex than wavelengths, it’s just a couple of sliders in Adobe Lightroom.

On the left you see the fixed white balance, and on the right you see the out of camera white balance.

Usually, the color of city lights is somewhere between 2200 kelvin and 3300. Modern LED lamps tend to be in the lower end of the span, but there is only way to find out, and that is by adjusting the temperature.

This usually brings you to the right temperature, but with the city lights of Rome, I found that I hit the bottom, which is 2000 degrees Kelvin, before I am happy. And I am only JUST happy and not really happy. No flexibility at all.

This is much better, but there is still a purple and yellow hue to the statue. To adjust this, I can use the Tint slider, but before doing that, I will show you a little trick. The trick will make it quite easy to find the best possible white balance much easier.

Tip: Before adjusting the temperature and tint slider, I dial up the Vibrance and the Saturation to 100. I am not going to leave them in this place, but it makes it easier to spot color casts because they are exaggerated.

I adjust the Temperature and the Tint to find a compromise. My aim is to balance the amount of blue and yellow and purple or green. This IS a compromise, but when the balance is found, I have found the best possible white balance. I will have to make local adjustments to make changes to it.

Typically this is a real problem if there are mixed light source, it could be electrical and natural light or just different sorts of electrical light.

This is what I ended up with, after using the trick:

While this has got a little more purple, it also has less yellow. It turned out, that some of the yellow really was too much green. The compromis is to accept a bit more purple in the image over all, but purple can be removed, using the HSL panel, in Lightroom, if need be (so can yellow for that matter).

When I dial the Saturation and Vibrance back to 0 I get this acceptable result:

And the full image looks like this:

I still had to work with the colors, but in general I have am rid of the super duper yellow image, and have something in the natural world. There is a purple hue, but that can fairly easy be removed using either Photoshop or Lightroom.

From here I did my Photomatix and Photoshop blend images show.

These are a couple of other examples of city night shots, that had a real strong yellow orange glow to them before I started processing them:

Cold evening at the Bean in Chicago.

Rothenburg split road. Not as vibrant as it could have been, if not for the strong yellow city light.

This trick on white balance I have showed you here is the easiest and fastest way I have found so far to do a pretty accurate white balance.

–Jacob Surland

The Fountain at Pantheon in Rome

The Fontana del Pantheon has an acid green color at night.

I just returned from Rome. We were down there to receive my parents in law. They had walked all the way from Denmark to Rome, not exactly on a pilgrimage. They began in 2003. My father-in-law crossed the Alps at the age of 76 with no problems at all.

We received them at the gate at Piazza del Popolo and had cold Prosecco (Italian version of champagne) ready. They ended up walking approximately 3300 km over a span of 13 years.

But, being in Rome, also offered a lot of photo opportunities; not as many as we had hoped, though. The only major site we visited, that did not have scaffoldings, was St. Peter’s Basilica.

On the very first morning, we went to the closest location the Spanish Stairs, and when we got there, it was completely sealed off, and entrance to the stairs was impossible. It didn’t matter a lot because the church at the top was covered in scaffoldings.

The Spanish Stairs were sealed off both at the top and the bottom.

Instead, we moved on to the Pantheon.

I can see that I have learned a lot. I shoot much more purposeful now than I did earlier. I have researched areas beforehand and have some ideas of what there is to shoot. I go straight for the more or less bullet proof shots, and then I start searching for more unusual angles. Using this method, I find that I always have at least one carry away shot.

The photo of Pantheon in the top of this post is one of my favorites and the first one I processed. I didn’t see it, at first, but when I got close to the fountain, this acid green color showed up. And as I moved closer, and I could see there was a shape – the foundation of the statue – in the water, and I went even closer to get this.

Believe me, that color is as good as straight out of the camera.

Pantheon itself is one of the most amazing buildings I have ever seen. The roof inside is insanely beautiful.

Rialto bridge reflected in the roof of a taxi boat

A quite unique reflection of the Rialto Bridge in Venice

Scaffoldings covered half of Rialto Bridge when I visited Venice. This, of course, was a great disappointment, as I had planned to shoot it. I call it Scaffolding Disease, and I seem to suffer from this disease.

The good thing about such situations is that you are forced to look for alternative compositions. In this case, I had half of the Rialto Bridge to work with, and only from this side. On the other side, houses on both sides were completely covered in scaffoldings too.

I walked around, and suddenly I saw this reflection in the roof. The Taxi boat had been lying there for ages. We had been at Rialto bridge since before the city lights were turned on, and the taxi had been there most of that time, but I hadn’t thought of using it as a reflection surface.

I am not sure I would have shot this shot, had it not been for the search for a unique composition, using only half the bridge. The reflection in the roof is a bonus, but it is the final touch, I think.

Warm light on Piazza san Marco

A passage leading into the Piazza San Marco in Venice. You can see the Palace of the Doge in the far distance.

On our way back to our hotel, after a long morning of photography in Venice, we had to cross Piazza San Marco to get back to our hotel. Just before we entered the Piazza, the most wonderful golden light met us. And even though I had stopped shooting, I put up my tripod once more.

The dynamic range is incredibly high in a photo like this, because of the dark passage and the sunrise exploding on Piazza San Marco. It requires shooting some extra stops to cover all light. I shot this both from -4 to +2 and from -5 to +1. As I got home, I can see, that the correct thing to do, would have been to shoot from -5 to +3, that would have been nine shots using my Nikon D800. But, as you can see I managed with a little bit less.

Photo by: Jacob Surland, www.caughtinpixels.com Licensed creative commons non-commercial v4.0. No derivative Work. Protected by Pixsy.com.

Tip: Pseudo HDR

Pantheon Reflecting the Sun Setting

Pantheon is one of the most beautiful buildings I have seen and I was even rewarded with the most beautiful sunset.

The photo is an old one, shot with my ancient Canon 400D. How to salvage an old photo? I took this photo as a single RAW on my old Canon 400D using a Sigma 10-20mm lens. I didn’t have a tripod, but the light was so gorgeous I just had to shoot the scene. What I did was to stand as still as I could and just fire away 20 shots hoping one would be sharp enough. The ISO I had turned up to 400, which is the highest acceptable ISO on that camera, and I the raised the f-stop to the highest value the lens allowed (lowest number). That gave me a shutter speed of 1/13 seconds, which requires a very steady hand. But I managed.

Tip: Try making Pseudo HDR photos from single exposure RAWs
In the processing had to major issues. I had to get a better balance between light and shadows and to increase the sharpness. To get better balance between the shadows and the light areas, I made a Pseudo HDR photo. To do that I made in Lightroom two artificial exposures by making virtual copies. One I made a -2 and the other I made +2. These to exposures I gave some strong noise reduction, and then I exported all three to Photomatix and tone mapped them. The result was awesome. Not as good as if I had shot three proper bracketed shots, but good enough.

The sharpness I achieved by duplicating the layer in Photoshop and then applying a fairly strong Unsharp Mask (really a bad name for a sharpening rool). That did some really good things to the roof of the Pantheon. I blended in the good parts of the sharpened image – the rest I didn’t use.

Caught In Pixels