How it Was Shot: Sandra Herber’s ‘Power Lines’

The image of these power lines was taken in Alberta, Canada in late December 2017. I have been traveling to the Canadian Prairies to photograph since 2013 and have been focusing more and more on minimalist winter scenes since my first winter trip there in 2015.

I now go almost exclusively in the winter and have built up quite a nice series of winter minimalist Prairie images, of which this is a favorite. The Prairies are a wonderful place for minimalist photography because, whether you love it or hate it, it’s a place of flat land and wide-open skies. Think of that old Prairie joke: the land is so flat you can watch your dog run away for two days.

I started this trip in Alberta, spending a couple of days shooting with my friend Len Langevin (whom I’d met through Flickr) before heading east into Saskatchewan. On this day, we started out in Red Deer and drove back roads south as far as Mossleigh, Herronton, and Brant (250 kilometers south). The distances on the Prairies are huge and it’s not uncommon to travel 500 km or more in a day of shooting. At the three places I named there were grain elevators I wanted to photograph, but they also simply served as places to aim for on that day.

My main goal was to travel backroads to find minimalist scenes to photograph. And we did -- we shot shelterbelts, grain silos, and farm equipment before stopping for lunch when the skies cleared and the light turned harsh. In the afternoon, a brief storm blew up, slightly obscuring the horizon and it was at that point we saw these power lines crossing the road. I excitedly asked Len to stop and we climbed to the top of the embankment on our side of the road to try and get some separation between the nearest pylon and the road.

Although it was a better vantage point than shooting from road level, after climbing the embankment, I realized the shot was actually in the other direction. On that side, the pylon was further away – really emphasizing the immensity of the space in the Prairies – there was no road, and the snow squall was beautifully softening the distant trees and stubble in the field. I was shooting with my favorite lens – the Nikon 14-24mm 2.8 – and shot this at 14mm to emphasize the wide-open space I love so much. I only took a few shots. There was really only one composition here and all that was necessary was to center myself and make sure I was square on to the scene. Then we were on our way, continuing our search for more minimalist shots.

In terms of processing, there was hardly anything to do with the image aside from cropping it into a square. I tried it in black and white, but I’ve come to really love the neutrals of the Prairies in winter – in this case, the stubble from the harvested crop, so I left it in color. I upped the exposure a bit, the whites as well, and reduced the vibrance. All of that was done in Lightroom. The image, to my mind, didn’t need any more work.

What I love about photographing on the Prairies is the lucky accident of coming across scenes like this. While the targets of each day are those that can be easily scouted online, such as grain elevators, it’s often the random finds along the way that produce the best images.

**The article is courtesy ofELEMENTS Magazine. **ELEMENTS is the new monthly magazine dedicated to the finest landscape photography, insightful editorials, and fluid, clean design. Inside you will find exclusive and in-depth articles and imagery by the best landscape photographers in the world such as Freeman Patterson, Bruce Barnbaum, Rachael Talibart, Charles Cramer, Hans Strand, Erin Babnik, and Tony Hewitt, to name a few. Use the PETAPIXEL10 code for a 10% discount off the annual subscription.

About the author: Sandra Herber is an avid, amateur photographer. She is a librarian in Toronto, Canada but she spends all her free time (and disposable income) photographing in Canada and around the world. Her subjects range from old wooden grain elevators on the Canadian Prairies to Mayan ruins in Mexico to icebergs in Antarctica. More and more, though, she is drawn to photographing minimalist images in winter. She has a special love for the Prairie provinces of Canada and their wide-open spaces.

#inspiration #elementsmagazine #fineart #fineartlandscapephotography #howitwasedited #howitwasshot #landscapephotography #sandraherber

My Color Grading Workflow for Raw Landscape Photos in LR and ACR

Color grading is a vital part of creating an eye-catching image, especially if you’re shooting raw. There are many ways to tackle it, of course, but in this 12-minute video and article, I want to show my personal Lightroom color grading process from start to finish.

Step 1: Camera Profile & White Balance

The very first thing I usually do is to change the used camera profile. For more base saturation, I’m choosing the Adobe Landscape profile, while if I want to just slightly brighten up the darkest parts of the image, I’m going for the Adobe Standard profile.

Next, I go on to adjusting the white balance. For sunsets, I love adding more temperature which results in an overall warmer image. Sometimes it might be hard to decide what exactly you want to achieve. In this case, it might help to first turn up the vibrance and saturation all the way and then adjust the white balance, to get a better feeling for the colors of the photo. Once done, turn down the vibrance and saturation again.

Step 2: Balancing the Exposure

Before I can continue the color grading, I balance the exposure of the photo to get a better idea of which color themes work, and which don’t. For this scene, I dropped the highlights, raised the shadows, added a bit of exposure, and finally added some contrast. After adjusting those things, the photo still felt a little gloomy, so I added vibrance for "friendlier" colors.

Step 3: Local Adjustments

Of course, local adjustments are another vital part of the exposure-balancing process. For this photo, I wanted to make the sky just a bit darker. With a cloudless sky like this, it is super easy to do using graduated filters. I added one over the sky, roughly overlapping the mountains. However, to not change the brightness of the mountain peaks, I used a luminance range mask and specifically targeted the bright sky. Once that was set up, I simply dropped the exposure, which also gave me some more blue tones in the sky.

On the left side, there is very strong and beautiful golden hour light with a bit of fog. With the use of a radial filter, my goal was to add a little more fog and make the golden colors just a bit stronger. Adding more fog is actually very easy, just carefully decrease the dehaze amount. This adds fog, but also, we lose saturation, and it will make the area brighter. To counter the lost colors, I simply increased the white balance temperature inside of that radial filter.

Step 4: Tone Curve

At this point comes my favorite part: the main color grading. For sunsets or sunrises, I love to add some more red/yellow tones using the tone curve. In the red channel, I very carefully drag the point for the highlights to the left (adding red tones) while in the blue channel I drag the point for the highlights straight down (adding yellow tones).

Step 5: HSL Adjustments

Further adjustments are made in the HSL panel. First, I take a close look at which colors might be distracting and how I can fix that. In this case, the green tones in the center were a bit too much for my taste. In the hue tab, I dropped the green hue all the way down. This gave the grass in the center a more yellow-ish look and makes everything look much more harmonic. Then, in the saturation tab, I boosted the orange and blue tones slightly. Finally, in the luminance tab, I dropped the blue luminance for a darker sky and increased the greens for slightly brighter grass.

Step 6: Split Toning

One of the more impactful changes comes in the color grading panel (split toning). For sunsets or sunrises using a warm tone for the highlights and mid-tones of the photo makes a huge difference. Boosting the saturation of those gives you very intense colors. Of course, this might not be for everyone as at this point it gets very vibrant. You can balance this a little more by giving the shadows a cold color tone.

Here's was the photo looked like before editing:

Here's the finished photo after editing:

I hope you found this walkthrough helpful for your own post-processing and photography!

About the author: Christian Möhrle is a professional landscape photographer who has been capturing photos since 2010. Besides photography, he works as a media and motion designer for a living. For more, you can see additional videos on his YouTube Channel as well as his Instagram.

#postprocessing #walkthroughs #acr #adobecameraraw #christianmöhrle #colorgrading #howitwasedited #lightroom #lr #walkthrough

NASA Shows How the Mars Perseverance Rover Took its First Selfie

Back in April, the Mars Perseverance rover shared a selfie that included the Ingenuity helicopter drone on the surface of the Red Planet. The space agency has now shared a video and detailed explanation of how that photo was taken, including the fact it is made up of 62 individual images.

NASA explains that the point of the selfie isn't just to show off to folks back on Earth and perhaps inspire new generations of space enthusiasts, but actually is a way for the engineers to check wear and tear on the rover.

In the video clip above, the results of Perseverance’s robotic arm can be seen as it maneuvered to take the 62 images that compose the finished image. What it doesn’t capture is how much work went into making this first selfie happen. In a separate video below, Vandi Verma, Perseverance's Chief Engineer for Robotic Operations, explains.

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"The way you and I might take a selfie is by holding a camera up with our arm and taking a single image," she says. "The way the rover takes a selfie is a little more complex than that."

The rover uses its' WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) camera that is positioned at the end of its robotic arm. The main purpose of this arm is to allow the rover to take close-up images of rocks for scientific analysis.

"Even with the arm fully extended, it can't cover the entire rover in a single image," Verma explains. "To capture the entire rover, we take multiple images and then stitch them together."

The image below shows a computer simulation of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover taking its first selfie. The point of view of the rover’s WATSON camera is included to show how each of the 62 images were taken. Those photos were later sent to Earth and stitched together into the selfie.

The team tries to hold the camera in the same position for each shot, and to do so it actually may mean that the arm has to move quite a lot.

"It can take up to an hour of arm motion and imaging to take that entire selfie," Verma says. "The reason you don't see the robotic arm in the selfie is that it is moving in between the different image frames that we are taking and we include enough overlap between the images so that when we stitch them together, we don't have to include the arm."

In the video clip above where Verma explains how the photo was taken, she also notes that for the first time, a Mars rover also has a microphone equipped, which allows them to share the sound of the rover moving its arm and taking each frame.

“The thing that took the most attention was getting Ingenuity into the right place in the selfie,” said Mike Ravine, Advanced Projects Manager at MSSS. “Given how small it is, I thought we did a pretty good job.”

Once the photos were compiled and sent back to Earth, image processing engineers began their work. They had to clean up any blemishes caused by dust that had settled on the camera, assemble the images into frames with a mosaic and smooth out their seams with software, and finally warp the crops so that it looks more like a normal camera that the public is used to seeing.

While a selfie on Earth is made by a single person, the Perseverance's selfie took an entire team of people and almost an entire week.

#news #software #technology #cameradrone #drone #howitwasedited #howitwasmade #howitwasshot #ingenuity #mars #marsingenuitydrone #marsingenuityhelicopter #marsperseverancerover #nasa #perseverance #redplanet #selfie #space