As we advance into our past weekend’s photos, there came the realization that they should be broken up even more, and so we’re going to have a ‘part three’ later on. Right now, we have what the environment was looking like, which is specific, because the day dawned (as predicted by meteorologists) in a dense fog.
When instructing students about ISO, my basic advice is, use the lowest value that still allows you to get the shot, but get the shot. Higher ISO values get progressively grainier and noise-laden, and the uppermost on any camera body is almost always next to worthless. However, it also depends on what you’re going to do with it. If you take the entire frame and reduce it down to web display size, like here, the reduction in detail may allow you to get away with something extreme like ISO 6400, like here. But it undoubtedly helps that there really isn’t much of anything to see from the image anyway, few subtleties in tone and little detail – we’re only getting general conditions and mood from it. Also, to keep it resembling what the conditions actually looked like while there, the exposure compensation was set for -2/3 stop, so the exposure metering wouldn’t drive it up too bright.
The blue hue was pretty much present, too, the thick humidity and the bare trait that it was before sunrise and the light all reflected from within the atmosphere greatly reducing the other colors. But for giggles, I tweaked the colors a little, trying for something more neutral, which wasn’t too hard. Others colors were there, just overwhelmed by the blue light.
Yes, same tree/stump, opposite side. While the water level is certainly down from where it’s been before, it was also up from where it had been recently, as shown by the flooded grasses just barely appearing at the bottom of the frame.
While we waited on imminent sunrise and the fog to lift, we watched for useful compositions, which a great blue heron (Ardea herodis) provided in a couple of instances.
Unlike many birds, herons have pretty decent night vision, I’m inclined to say better than ours, because I hear them getting spooked away from their night perches and flying croaking out over the water all the time. So this one might have spent the night in the immediate vicinity (we saw it some time before this image,) or it may have flown here at any point in time before we arrived. It provided a slightly better pose just a little later.
It had flown here shortly after the first image, and looks less distinct, not because the fog was thickening, but because it was almost twice as far away now; you can look at the water in both pics, seen from my standing position, and judge from that. I think I might have tweaked the colors slightly on this one to make the trees stand out better.
While the fog did eventually break, most of the way anyway, it wasn’t until after sunrise and so the sun never really made an appearance until after we decided to leave the area. It did get bright enough to snag a few other images though, most of which will be in part three, but I played around with some moisture-laden web strands on unidentified berries.
At this point I’d dropped the camera down to ISO 1600, but was still focusing manually because autofocus had too much of a tendency to try and grab the higher contrast from the background, and I wasn’t carrying any macro lens – this is just the 18-135 STM. I have another frame where the foremost berries were sharper but the dew soft, and I attempted to focus-stack the two together, but the shooting angle had changed just enough from my swaying that it wasn’t worth the effort. I’d chased a few other drop-laden orb webs too, of which there were plenty, but I never found one that I could frame decently and will probably discard all of them – I’ve done better.
One last frame, with a curiosity, before we go to part three, which will be all birds. The fog had ‘cleared’ only not completely, and I used another heron as a focal point for the scene, with more grasses that show that the water had been lower before this, for a significant time.
While unloading and looking at these in thumbnail form, I thought I had a corrupt file or even a shutter issue, from the vertical banding that shows throughout the frame, stepping along brighter to the right, but this was just the fog, thicker in the distance and so making the small points along the shoreline show up much more distinctly than normal, also reflected in the water. This is almost exactly the same thing that gives the Blue Ridge mountains their name, because the increasing thickness of the humidity between successively farther peaks just turns everything more blue. Normally no such effect is visible on the lake, the distances being too small, but it make the meandering shoreline much more evident.
Soon, the foggy birds – can’t wait. (Say that to someone at work, and nothing else. They’ll probably think you’re talking about some app…)
You might think you wouldn’t need exposure compensation when the sky is right around that 18% grey middle tone that meters are calibrated for, but the key factor is, the sky is significantly brighter than the subjects against it, especially without direct light on them to brighten them up a bit, so without compensation, the frames were looking like this. And yes, the sky looks exactly the same hue as above – the overcast is never perfectly uniform, so the frame at left was actually brighter than the frame above, since the frame above has been lightened by 2/3 of s stop; the difference is plainly visible in the osprey. This is exactly why exposure compensation is usually linked by default to the dial that sits under your thumb, so this can be adjusted on the fly as you might switch from aiming into the sky to aiming against dark foliage – you just have to remember to keep adjusting this compensation, better than I did for this frame.
Dipshit (I’m talking to myself – that’s what the italics mean. In this case, anyway.) This is not the last day of July, so you got the abstracts early, probably before they were ripe, and I apologize. I have no excuse, and should know by now to double-check my senile old brain, since this isn’t the first time it’s happened – it’s 
Last night we got a fierce set of thunderstorms, the kind that come with tornado warnings, which blipped our power here twice, preventing me from accomplishing too much on the computer. Soon after they’d passed, we could still see plenty of flashes lighting up the eastern sky, and I realized that the moon was also coming out while these were going on. That’s an opportunity I can’t let pass, so I drove down to the waterfront to see what was happening. That sunset pic up top there isn’t, since this was near 1 AM – you’re seeing a distant lightning strike instead, with supplementary light from the moon and the waterfront lights during an 11-second exposure. That’s a closeup of the strike to the right, many kilometers distant and almost obscured by the rain. It’s an ‘okay’ shot, but I would have been disappointed if this was all I had to show for the excursion. Luckily, it isn’t.
