What to do with gray?

[drsilver]

Around here, October through May, four days a week, it looks like this. Not too cold, sometimes wet, always gray.



It's coming up on a year since I joined Talk Photography. Same as when I picked up a camera again with verve as a hobby. And about this time last year I remember thinking, boy this light sucks. But I had other things on my mind. I had to learn the mechanics of digital photography, so a lot of my stuff was just practice anyway. Back of my mind, though, if I'm gonna shoot here, I gotta learn to shoot in this.



I've mentioned elsewhere that I generally go out looking for good light and start there. One exception is birds. I go looking for birds and take whatever light they're in. Plus my wife has taken an interest in my expeditions and that's reason enough to be out looking.



I had a bit of an epiphany. I don't know if I'll ever see these exact conditions again, but it was a perfectly calm day with the Sound glass smooth and reflecting a perfectly gray sky for perfectly soft light. That's a place to start.



I looked at the images in B&W. That's a promising tool for my dilemma with gray. Soft light compresses your dynamic range and B&W lets you take advantage of that. Contrast and density. Zone System stuff.



Things look OK in color too. Muted tones, clean backgrounds.



Thoughts? Musings? Tips and tricks? Examples? Please share.

 

[Deleted member 34016]

Shot on a very damp grey morning= a little PP ( contrast etc) helps it pop

DSC05783 Heron in the Mist by Les Moxon, on Flickr

Les

 

[drsilver]

I been looking at the pictures I took the other day quite a bit. I mentioned I'd had an epiphany. I live under the giant softbox that is the Pacific Northwest most of the year. The shots I like the best are the ones where I could strip the composition down to nothing. Vertical placement was the closest thing to a flourish. A distraction-free composition. Whatever else is going on with the picture, distraction-free is a powerful tool.

But then you get a picture like this.





I like this picture. My little dancing cormorant.

For such a compact package, there's a lot going on in the picture. Looks like a tchotchke from a northern beach town gift shop. Photographically, there are a lot of problems to solve. I don't know what to do with it.

First is the bird. The dominant cormorant that day was black. Crow black. Soft light makes it a construction-paper cutout. As much as I love that bird, he's necessary and distracting at the same time.

Second, what the hell is that thing? It's pilings, but what are those spikey things and why have the cables been left to rot? More distraction.

(I know the answers to those questions. There was a plaque. If you can guess what those spikey things are, you'll win a hearty congratulations.)

You think there's anything I could try in post to make the foreground pop a little more? I tried a few different versions, but the main difference is the background. First I embraced the high-key look of the day. Then I brought the atmospheric colors back into it. The last one I acknowledged the color of the Sound but left it highish key. None of them are particularly satisfying.

Maybe this shot is just beach town gift shop and that's all it will ever be.

Still, anybody have any ideas I might try in post? (I'm a novice at Lightroom and don't know anything about anything else at this point.)

Or, any tips we might look out for when we find ourselves with this type of light again?

 

[dweeble]

You have a very good eye, and are probably too self critical but in a good way!

Have you got PS as well? Steep learning curve but many different tools. If you haven't, GIMP is free and does much the same. darktable is also free and actually might suit you even better, very powerful masks once you get the knack (easier said than done) and a huge range of detailed adjustments. Heck they even have a specific zone system module!

 

[Nod]

I like the muted colour versions. At a first glance they look almost colourised B&W.

 

[drsilver]

I went out and did an experiment yesterday. I wanted to see if I could isolate a gray sky as purely a light source. The light in front of me and the light behind me and right and left is all the same.

I dug out my old Minolta meter. I took an incident reading from underneath the leaves. That's what I wanted to expose for. Modern cameras have great, sophisticated metering algorithms, but no reflected reading was going to come within 3 stops of what I was looking for.

I put the camera in full manual mode too. That's a digital first for me. Needed to shut the camera's brain off. Camera gave me the tools to do that. Thank you, Canon. That's hard work, manual mode. You gotta think.





I kinda like this soft, high-key look. I don't have a lot of experience with that but I can see where it could be put to use. I'm trying to put together some tools I can use when it's gray outside. It's gray outside a lot here this time of year. You might see some more experiments on this thread.

 

[SFTPhotography]

I think you've done well with the wild life shots.

For landscapes - grey days. Try coastal long exposures if there is wind, try woodland where harsh sunlight isn't a good thing. Try wild life...try cityscapes at dusk/dawn

 

[SFTPhotography]

Here is what I did with grey this year - not nature but you can craft landscapes in this poor conditions

_DSC3997 by Stephen Taylor, on Flickr

_DSC3956 - Version 2 by Stephen Taylor, on Flickr

Hit the saturation sliders big on this

_DSC4210 by Stephen Taylor, on Flickr

Flat grey night. In the urban setting that is a world of possibilities

_DSC4439 by Stephen Taylor, on Flickr

 

[LeeRatters]

I like your shots in your opening post. Certainly not the sort of thing I look for it take though.

Grey, overcast days I almost always head to a woodland. You can find some pockets of light coming though (which can be boosted a little in PP of course) and it helps not having bright highlights. There's alwats nice detailed, more abstract, maybe macro type of shots available too.

 

[drsilver]

I've kind of neglected this thread, but I've been working on my gray. Plenty of opportunities around here this time of year.

I mentioned I had an epiphany. I'm surrounded, all the time with soft, dull light. My instinct is to fight it but I don't win much. And soft light can be good if you stop fighting it.




B&W works good. Tones of gray after all. I spent a little time fighting B&W too. I made a lot of B&W before but this is the 21st century, move on. But the rules for B&W haven't changed, least not the ones I follow. Complements the light well. And the kind of stuff I shoot these days lends itself to a soft, fine art finishing, which this new-fangled digital crap handles quite well, thank you.

 

[drsilver]

You think I'm exaggerating about the gray? Here's a picture of my car. One on the left is color. One on the right from a selenium B&W preset.



Here's my birds for this post. Wasn't room for them up above. Gotta post the birds.