Lens: Voigtlander nokton 50mm f1.1
Camera: NEX-7, ISO800, f1.1, 1/25, raw
It has been a substantially awful day. I had a meeting in the deep south of the country for a national research project, and I was on a very tight schedule, which got totally messed up by a violent storm that hit Rome (and most of the central part of Italy as well). The airport went haywire due to the frequent lightnings, extremely strong winds and heavy rain, so all of my flights were delayed. I was supposed to be at the meeting at 10.45 and be home at 16.00, I ended up reaching the meeting point at noon and being back home in the evening. Plus, I got totally drenched in water. And since I was already a bit sick, now I’m totally wrecked. I’m pretty sure tomorrow I’ll wake up with the fever…
The day would have been bad by its own, but it got awful when, once returned at home, I found out that my favorite photographic facebook group got into a huge fight and, basically, torn apart. At first it was just a discussion between a member and the group administrator, but shortly after a bunch of other members aligned against the administrator, a couple of others took the opposite side, and in less than one hour so many bad things were said by both sides that there was no way to get back into “normality” anymore.
A new group has been created by the “rebels”, but the former group resists and is still there. Basically, my friends are now split into two different groups, both more or less still complaining about “the others”. I know this is the end, there’s no way that any of the two groups can survive. We existed because we were together, I feel that from now on only those who strengthen a personal bound we’ll be able to stay in touch, the others will just go on their relative path.
Yet, this all thing put me really down. I’m drenched, wrecked, I totally feel the fever coming along, and I lost a group of friends I care about. So, these are the reasons of the moody shot, a view of the raindrops on our studio window, with the traffic lights shining in the background.
Great shot as always Luca! Your 365(+1) project has been very inspiring to follow and I think I’ve also learned, in some ways, to see how you see.
That one thing which always affects me in your pictures, is a way you get very clear and pure white light in your pictures (inside or outdoors). I work with a NEX-5N and always use custom white balance, but I cannot touch the clearness and pureness of your pictures. Any advices you could offer for beginner? How do you make it so crisp and pure?
Ciao Toni, thanks for you kind comments! I’m really glad you’re enjoying the project and that you feel you’re learning to take better shots because of it.
Regarding the white balance, it sure starts with the custom white balance on camera (even if it is not really needed, it helps a lot in composing to have the right colors already when shooting), but to be sure to get it right you should shoot in raw. This way you’ll have total freedom to correct the white balance in post production (you’ll be able to to all the corrections you could do on camera, but with more time and a larger screen). I would also add a calibrated screen to the recipe.
Hey, thanks for the fast reply! I’m coming from the graphics design background and I’m familiar with the raw-files and post production. To be specific about what I like about your pictures (besides obvious creativity!) is that you almost never have problems regarding mixed lights indoors or outdoors – yet in the real world one often encouters such problems. So I’ll take it you just tweak things in post production and spot edit the difficult parts to end up such a harmonic end product regarding light and colors? This is at least what I’m trying to do, but I guess it takes some good eyes and taste which is known to be hard to acquire. 🙂
Well, I don’t have problems with mixed lights with the photos I publish 😉 There are situations in which there’s really little that can be done to get a proper white balance, like when there’s just one strongly mono-color light (as the street lights here in Rome, almost pure orange lights). Mono-colo lights are not only difficult to correct, but produce very little details and tons of noise. In this cases what I look for is any other light source I can include in the shot.
Take this: https://www.lucarossini.it/2403651/
If I had Agata lit by the street lights everything would have been orange, and very difficult to correct. I switched on the reading light so to have something with a broader light spectrum and I corrected to have that one white.
Here: https://www.lucarossini.it/2163651/
I have no white, but the green inside the market gives a third color to the otherwise boring orange/electric blue of the street/dusk sky combination
Finally, take this one: https://www.lucarossini.it/2243651/
The area was barely lit by the street lights, and the colored bulbs were not enough to balance the un-correctable orange. I introduced the white of the laptop to do that.
Basically, I do not tweak the colors afterwards, meaning that I do not alter colors “on spot”, but I work on the white balance solely, that is, the global color balance in the picture. The work is in using (or introducing, when possible/needed/wanted) different light sources so to balance for the color/mood you’re looking for 🙂
Hope this helps!
Thank you Luca for your detailed answer – and time you took to write it. This was unobvious to me and certainly makes me look mixed light situations differently: something that can be done while photo*graphing* and not the usual photoediting.