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Standing near the
summit of Clingmans Dome, the highest peak in Great
Smoky Mountains National Park, I looked down upon a
sea of fast-moving clouds. I spent several hours
photographing from Clingmans that evening, starting
about two hours before sunset, and continuing to
work after sunset. This image was one of the
last I made that evening, in the waning twilight—it
was too dark to focus, or to see my camera's
controls without a flashlight. I set the lens' focus
ring to the infinity mark, and stopped down to f/11
to ensure sufficient depth-of-field. Since I was
using Canon's 90mm TSE tilt-shift lens, just to be
safe I added a little bit of forward tilt to the
lens, creating a focal plane that ensured sharp
focus from the first ridge in the image to the horizon.
Because it was so
dark, I had to raise my ISO to 400, but even then I
had a 30-second exposure. Since the clouds
were moving very fast beneath me, this was actually
the moment I had been waiting for: a chance for a
long exposure at twilight to create an
impressionistic blur. Although I experimented with several
different shutter speeds to get the look I wanted,
as it turns out, thirty seconds was just right.
I choose to keep the
composition simple, focusing on the repeating shapes
of the exposed ridgelines, to keep attention on the
flowing clouds. To me, this image was more about
color contrast than dynamic composition—the
contrast between the warm tones of the fading
twilight sky and the cool blues of the shadowed
clouds dictated the composition.
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As always, I strive to give my digital images a
"film-like" look when processing them on the
computer, to replicate the colors, saturation, and
contrast of color slide film. This was particularly
important for this image. With color slide film,
areas in shadow, lit only by light reflecting from a
blue sky above, take on a strong blue cast.
Although this light is real, our brains tend to
compensate for the blue light (as if operating on an
"auto white balance" setting), so we do
not perceive the blues the way that film would. When I used to shoot
color slide film, I would strive to find ways to
juxtapose warm light with cool light in shadowed
areas, to take advantage of film's blue-response
characteristics and create a pleasing color contrast. I find that digital capture fails
to respond quite the same way, so a little work in
Photoshop is required to get the same warm/cool
contrast look of film.
Because the clouds were lit only by the darkening
blue sky above, there was a lot of blue in the
clouds in the raw file. While converting the raw
file for editing in Photoshop, I first set the white
balance to retain the blues, using a relatively cool
setting of 4500. This setting also cooled the warmly-lit
sky, which was still glowing with the last light of
sunset. To preserve the warm tones, I processed the raw file a second time
using a warmer white balance (5800). I combined
the two resulting exposures in Photoshop using layer
masking and blending techniques. This
double-processing technique allows me to capture
warm/cool contrast in a way similar to that of
color slide film.
I always "expose to the right" when shooting raw
files, as shadow areas tend to build up
quality-reducing noise in digital captures, so I
often find it is necessary to reduce my exposure
during post-processing to achieve the right look.
Here, reducing the exposure also brought the added
benefit of intensifying the colors. I then applied
some contrast and saturation adjustments to further
bring out the richness of the tones. I find
that a saturation boost in Photoshop of about +20 to
+30 is required to replicate the look
of color slide film, while avoiding film's tendency
to sometimes push colors to a cartoonish extreme.
Although for this image I wanted the blues to stand
out, I didn't want to push them too far from the raw
file. I ended up increasing the saturation for the
blues and the yellows by about +25 to achieve the
final look.
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