Color week Saturday

sunrise colors over pond
And so we wrap up the color week with a relatively recent one – most of the rest had been prepared for 2015, when I was doing a weekly color post, and had never been used, so now I can remove the ‘Color’ folder from my blog records. There will still be photos/posts dedicated largely towards color, but it will be as I come across them.

This was sunrise at the end of April, the same day as the turtle abstract, but it’s a little unrealistic. First off, I had contrast and saturation settings up higher, the presets that I use for when the light is muted and low, just to make the colors pop a bit. But I also dropped exposure compensation down a little to enhance the sky – 1/3 stop below what I normally use. Bracketing exposure during sunrise is highly recommended, and you’ll likely find that under-exposing produces the best results, but a lot of that will depend on how bright the sky is and how the camera is reading the light – aim lower to include more below the horizon, and the sky will go brighter. Brightness is not always the key, because it can easily wash out colors. Also, and I can’t stress this enough, do not trust the LCD on the camera to tell you how the exposure looks; they’re notoriously inaccurate, not just poorly corrected and gamma-adjusted, but beholden to the ambient light conditions and sometimes even viewing angle. Take lots of images at different settings to be sure you get what you want.

By the way, there was actually a hidden purpose to color week, and I’ll let you in on it shortly.

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