Gale has several loves, Four of them are Autumn colours, cemeteries, photography and me driving her. And to be honest, I love these things too.
There are a few large cemeteries around us, Crown Hill in Indianapolis is the closest, but we’ve recently also been to Cave Hill in Louisville and Spring Grove Cincinnati.
I never have much luck with photography at cemeteries. I take tons of shots of gravestones from a distance, gravestones from up close, statues, leaves etc, but nothing really worked. Gale, correctly, says that the bright sun is not conducive to photos. Especially when we’re talking about bright white gravestones and statues. They are just so washed out and the shadows are so sharp that no amount of photoshopping can rescue a bad image.
Then we went to Cave Hill on a cloudy day and I managed to take at least half a dozen photos that I was happy with. The soft shadows and bright colours of the leaves against the grayness of the stones just seemed to work this time.
We picked a perfect day, the leaves were starting to turn, despite the warm weather and we found enough good leaves laying around to be able to pose a few shots.
I originally thought this was a seed pod from a laurel tree, but Gale managed to find that it’s actually Magnolia Grandiflora. I once saw a tutorial that showed a similar effect. Darken the leaves almost to black and sharpen the fruit, or seed pod in this case. I’m quite happy with the result.
The cemetery also has a number of really cool trees. This being one. The image turned out rather dark, so seemed a good opportunity to try HDRI. HDRI is a process whereby you take three photographs at different exposure levels and then use a program to blend the three images together. This brings out the dark areas without blowing out the light areas. It can create some quite ethereal images, which I like, but I wanted this to look a little more natural.
So, hopefully, this photo looks pretty natural, but the tree itself on the correctly exposed shot was pretty much just a dark tree shaped block.
Then, of course, came the statues. I decided this time to get close up, low depth of field, shots rather than from a distance. Pretty happy with this idea. Although I think my aperture was a little wide, around f5.6 and it should have been smaller, maybe 7 or 8.
Then, thankfully, it started to rain. yet another dimension I could use. Water dripping from the statues. But it wasn’t big drops of rain, but rather that kind of rain that is just in the air and gets you wet and miserable without producing drops from statues noses.
Luckily I had a bottle of water, so managed to give Mother Nature a little helping hand. This shot really shows that I had my aperture set way too high. The drop is in focus, but the cheek isn’t. It’s just so hard to tell on a 1 inch screen.
And finally another shot in the fake rain. The leave is nice and shiny, but I didn’t manage to get a nice crisp photo of a drop.
But I’m still pretty happy with all the results. You can see larger shots of some of these, and others in my Gallery.
