KISHAN THAKRAR
A LEVEL ART PHOTOGRAPHY PORTFOLIO
Photoshoot: Fawsley Hall
I visited Fawsley Hall to capture some atmospheric sunset photos. There was not much atmosphere, but the sky was very interesting, and the photos are valuable to use with some of the atmospheric photomontages to provide me with interesting skies to use. The following images were my favourites that I adjusted slightly in Lightroom:
= Photo taken by me.
Here I added Clarity in Adobe Lightroom, which gave the sky more of a HDR effect. I did not want light to be added to the foreground however, so I lowered the Shadows, which darkens the darker parts of the image. The colours did not need any adjusting; they are the raw colours captured, I just needed to lower the exposure slightly to bring out more colours. I also sharpened the image to increase detail in the sky.
I wanted there to be a contrast between the colours in the sky and the colours in the foreground, with a much more vibrant sky and duller in front. I added some monochromatic noise to add a sense of atmosphere and energy to the image, with an overexposed sky representing light and life. I desaturated the grass slightly to enhance this. I also wanted to show stillness in the image; capturing mainly stationary objects and not much going on in the image.
For this picture I struggled to capture much atmosphere so instead I did a 1 second exposure, intending to capture calmer ripples in the water. This would be a good image to digitally add mist to in Photoshop, because it often works well with water and reflections such as this. Again, I desaturated the trees' colours and added slightly more Vibrance to the sky.
Later on, the sky got darker and the colours more red. I wanted to concentrate the focus on the red colours in the sky, so I lowered the shadows, creating almost a silhouette of the trees, and I increased the Clarity to give a more HDR feel.
I also lowered the Blue tones of the image, to stress the importance of the reds present. This left an interesting purple colour in the clouds near the top of the photo.
I felt that the colours getting more vibrant towards the centre was a good representation of atmospheric perspective.
For the image below, I thought about the composition of the image and positioned the shot so that trees and shadows surrounded the building. I then added some atmosphere by adjusting the tone curve to look like this:
This allowed the pure black tones to be lightened, to which I adjusted the tint of the shadows to a dark green colour, producing the result below. This technique has obscured a lot of the detail in the image but compliments the vegetation, whilst adding a sense of atmosphere. I particularly like how the road fades into the background in the lower part of the image. I also think the green shadow tone gives the image an illustrative look in some parts.
