When The Light Is Uninspiring

There are times when I go out to shoot and the light is fantastic…..but then there are those other times. Times when the the light is just uninspiring. Still, there can be interesting scenes and photographs to be had…..but that lighting is just blah.

Such was the case when I went out to shoot near a motel I was staying at when I was in Coos Bay, Oregon. There was an area of the river with pylons right next to the Coos History Museum that I thought would be interesting to photograph. It was very close by, so I decided to go even though the light wasn’t very good. I figured that at least I could explore what was there and experiment with some compositions while making plans for going back when the light was better.

I spent some time shooting and found a number of compositions I liked, particularly since there were some great reflections in the water. So I decided to see what I could make of the images that I had taken in a way that negated the dull and uninspiring lighting. I ended up with the image below, having used some textures and processing to bring out the parts of the image that had attracted me to the scene from the start.

Truth be told, I started taking shots before the bird was on the pylon. The bird entered the scene while I was making long exposures using a neutral density filter to make the water ‘glassy’. Because the exposure for the pylons was long, any images that contained the seagull had the seagull blurred because it was moving around. So I also took a number of shots without my neutral density filter in order to allow the shutter speed to be faster and allow for the capture of a sharp image of the bird. I then combined the images, taking the seagull from the one with the fast shutter speed and adding it to the image with the slow shutter speed. I had taken a number of sharp shots of the bird and chose one that had him (or her) looking straight at me.

So with Photoshop there are often interesting things that can be done with images that might not stand alone as shot!

Seagull On Pylons © Howard Grill

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