Assignment 5 - Interesting Lighting Situations

I'm a bit late posting this here, as assignment #6 is already due tomorrow. But better late than never, and hopefully I'll be more timely on posting #6 (maybe by Wednesday morning). Anyway, the goal of this assignment was simply to look for situations with interesting lighting. Things other than your ordinary sunny or overcast days, or your evenly lit flash lighting.

Almost as if mother nature were giving me a helping hand, the very next morning after class I was sitting in my office and looked out the window only to see that the black sky was just starting to clear off of the horizon. And by luck, it was still quite early (meaning the sun was low) and the clouds were blowing the opposite direction of what they normally do. These factors all combined to give me an amazing view, where the sky was still very dark but the sun was there illuminating everything (with just a touch of that golden hour coloring left). Turning my back to the sun, I found the brightly lit trees with a dark backdrop to be extremely dramatic. I ran out of my office with my camera looking for a place to shoot, and found this field in the woods by the lake worked nicely.



The next weekend, my wife and I decided to take an overnight trip to Niagara Falls photographing lighthouses there and back. After spending all day doing that, we about an hour away when sunset hit, and it was quite lovely. Driving on and on, I was looking for the perfect place to stop. I thought I had made a mistake by passing up the 2 different fields I wanted to photograph from, but I knew I made the right choice when I found this church.



The above image had a slight bit of editing. Due to the Digital Rebel's inability to show you a 3 color histogram, parts of the sky had saturated to solid yellow with my knowing it, but a little use of the burn tool in photoshop fixed this up reasonably.

After arriving in Niagara Falls and checking in at the hotel, we headed down to the falls for some late night shots of the falls illuminated. This first shot I though was fabulous, with the red light shining off of the sidewalk (which was soaked with mist from the falls).



I also like this shot of the falls lit by a glowing blue light, and framed between the dimly lit trees and the wall/fence.



The next day, on our way home, I was shooting a picture of a butterfly near one of the lighthouses when I saw this fuzzy tree. In order to fully backlight it (to get those hairs glowing on the edges) the sky ended up overexposed, but once again the burn tool in photoshop brought out some color in the background (which appeared solid white originally).



Finally, on our way home, we stopped in a small town for dinner. On the drive from the expressway to the town I saw this tree a corn field, and I knew the sun was getting low, so I figured by the time we were heading back out of town it would probably look quite dramatic. A short while later, it appeared exactly as I imagined it would, and I captured this shot.