Fiddler on the Roof

Ok, so it's a bad joke. "Sunrise, Sunset" is the name of one of the songs in the musical "Fiddler on the Roof", one of the classics and one where I still know most of the music despite never having actually seen it on stage, only on film.

What's that have to do with photography? Nothing, except that today's post is a short and sweet one about sunrises and sunsets. These shots are all about playing with the White Balance setting on the camera to enhance the colors rendered by the camera. Facebook friends have already seen them.

The sunrises are first (well, duh) and were shot with the camera set for a standard, cloudy white balance. For these shots, I had to boost blacks and highlights to improve the contrast, and boost the saturation of the reds and yellows just slightly (all in Lightroom). With a little more time to fiddle with the camera, I probably could have gotten closer to this directly out of the camera but I was trying to snatch the photo in the 3 minutes where the light was just right.

20mm, ISO 800, f/3.5, 1/25 © Richard Critz

20mm, ISO 800, f/3.5, 1/80 © Richard Critz

Pro glass

The Nikon D300 (and its bigger brothers) are incredible performers in low light. One can shoot at ISO 1600, and even higher, without fear of luminance or color noise spoiling the frame. Even up at ISO 3200 on the D300, the noise is easily managed with small adjustments in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw. Unfortunately, even with that capability, being limited to a maximum aperture of f/5.6 when fully zoomed on my consumer-grade zoom lenses has made it a challenge to get photos in dim auditoriums. It also makes portraiture more difficult by requiring more light from the strobes and having too large a depth-of-field.

An iPhone picture

Since I'm doing much shooting in dim auditoriums and am looking to start trying to do some portraiture professionally, I decided to take the plunge and buy the first item on my drool list, the Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 VR II lens. This is a professional grade beast that seems universally loved by the shooters who have it. If nothing else, I'll build up my left arm just holding the thing!

Technically, it features a couple of huge advantages. First, unlike my other zooms, its maximum aperture doesn't change as it zooms. It's a solid f/2.8 across the board. This gives me a full 2 stops more light through the lens when it's racked out to 200mm. Second, it has Nikon's latest generation vibration reduction technology (VR II) which lets me shoot without a tripod at much slower shutter speeds than would otherwise be possible. Nikon's marketing materials claim VR II allows you to hand-hold 4 stops slower than would be possible without VR II. Most of the reviews I've read contend that's pretty accurate.

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.