Mega-softbox

It was a few minutes before sunrise and it had snowed just enough the night before that the schools had declared a 2-hour delayed opening. The sky was still thick with clouds, almost to the ground, and there was enough fresh, new snow to make everything clean and white again. Sounds were muffled and the air was still. In short, it was one of those rare mornings that make New England winters worthwhile!

The clouds and the snow also made the light amazing. It was broad and soft, with no harsh shadows. It really was like being inside a gigantic softbox. The challenge, of course, was to make the camera see and, more importantly, reproduce what I was seeing. These are exactly the conditions that highlight the difference in dynamic range (the difference between the brightest highlights and the darkest shadows) between the human eye and a camera. The eye is so much more capable of adjusting to extremes.



I manually bracketed just about everything I shot, moving the shutter speed over a 2 stop range on each frame. In geek-speak, this gave me frames with the majority of the highlights at the right side of the histogram, at about the 3/4 point, and just above the half-way point. In the end, when I got the images back to the computer, I found that the ones I liked the best, and believed were most usable, were the ones that pushed the histogram to the right. Unfortunately, while this gave me the best color balance and the most detail in the highlights, it seemed to lose detail in the shadows.

For example, much of the foreground in this picture is lacking detail straight out of the camera. The picture here, though, has been retouched in Lightroom with an adjustment brush to increase the contrast in the foreground.

55mm, ISO 800, f/8, 1/20 © Richard Critz

Even with that adjustment, there isn't much detail in the foreground. In order to get more pop in the foreground, I had to take the image into Photoshop, duplicate the image, mask the away the background and set the duplicate layer to multiply, thereby increasing the detail in the foreground. I realize it's a subtle change but it makes a huge difference when the frame is printed. I also added some "packaging" to make it more "cool".

In general, I found that everything need a little bit of localized contrast tweaking using the adjustment brush in Lightroom or more wholesale multiplication of pixels in Photoshop. A small price to pay, really, for the opportunity to shoot in such incredible light.