Lower Light Imagery
Working in lower light can be an opportunity in disguise. Recently the assignments took me to downtown Los Angeles on day which seemed topsy turvy with clouds and less than golden sunlight. Given that a lot of the photography was going to take place in deep urban canyons, this didn’t bode well for shots with that morose gray tone that robs many images of otherwise great potential.
The buildings in downtown Los Angeles work in the sky. So focusing on them requires a capable lens. Mere digital lens settings won’t deliver the sharp resolution and shadow detail that builds a three dimensional shot instead of a flat “snapshot”. The rising towers have a lot of micropayment potential and I have enough uses for the images that one day spent gathering stock images is worth the forfeit of other income.
Lens settings capture within the frame at equal distances away, so one lense setting is awkward to uniformly capture a building that angles away in distance. So on a test basis the image in the LCD viewfinder must dictate the end capture. Experience in the editing room starts to pay off when a photographer can estimate the microstock results from what they see in the raw photo.
Gathering new stock images of the downtown area created opportunities because on this kind of a day there was very little foot traffic. The cars and commuter hour traffic was absent just when I had enough battery life and memory card room to experiment. Downtown Los Angeles is a city where surprisingly robust employee traffic occurs, which meant a weekend was a gamble to get pedestrian shots.
The downside of this photo was that placement of telephone wires and slanted signage placed flaws in the photo. Gathering the linear balanced margins together took careful cropping. But minimizing the image lost the resolution that gave the picture a lot of appeal. The blue and silver glaze of the building can be raised depending on what filters are used in programs like Photoshop.
The large size file of this picture holds a real commercial aspect, but the packaging has a rationale flaw for microstock uses: the building and its prominent signage are copyrighted.Therefore it must belong to my portfolio and serve as a reminder what possible shots can occur in future. But I can use it for blog purposes and a lot of ministe uses that require generic buildings.
