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Part of “photography life” is making the best of bad situations. Sound familiar? It’s the only chance to take that picture, but it’s not the golden hour, or its a dull day, or the inside lighting is a problem, or you forgot your tripod, or you left the right lens behind, or you can’t move to a better position to get the composition that you’d like, etc.. etc., etc. The list goes on and on (at least for me).
For this throwdown post examples of where you’ve made the best of a bad situation, and please share your story: what you wanted to achieve, what limitations you had and what you did (on the spot, and/or in post-processing) to make the best of it.
To get things going, here’s is an image taken on my first evening of a visit to the Mara Triangle. I could see through my binoculars that this giraffe had oxpeckers all over his neck and back, but it was just too dark to be able to see and photograph them clearly. To try to recover something from the original underexposed image, I used conversion to b&w. It allows us to figure out that the lumps on the giraffe’s neck are birds. And I rather like the overall simplicity.
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- https://www.instagram.com/robert.apple.98/
- https://photography667a.myportfolio.com/
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@robertapple- Posts:8856
Allows Edits? YesLove this photo Ann, I know this ain’t the shark tank but have you considered lightning up the shadows a tad to pull a little more detail out on the giraffes face.
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Yes! I have versions that lighten up the giraffe’s face, but then the contrast difference between the background and the giraffe is lost. With Luminar and you can change lighting differentially in the top and bottom half of the image, but a version that I uploaded here using that option looks like has a box of grey across the lower darker half.
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A week ago I was so excited to bump into a Half-collared Kingfisher (for the first time in my life) during one of my shoots at our local botanical gardens! It sat nicely on a rock in the middle of a pond but I was disappointed as it noticed me and flew away to a dark spot in a tree.
I pushed up the ISO’s, took a few shots and then waited for about half an hour to see if it would fly back to the rock – it would have made such a beautiful shot! It dived down however and arose from the water with a fish in its mouth (I thought it was Christmas)! I was so cross when it flew off to one of the metal ornaments close by (instead of the rock!) however, that I totally forgot to adjust my exposure! I wanted to kick myself when I saw this at home.
The best I could do was to kill the blown highlights to the best of my ability and to remove one of the ornamental steel rods in front of its body. Not a prize winner, but at least I can say that I have the shot! 😉
I also removed the rod from this shot:
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I think exposure mistakes are my biggest issue too, Tobie – I get excited and forget to check. Good job removing the bar! Some days I find that sort of editing easy and other days it is a nightmare. Yours looks perfect. Can I ask what program and tools you used?
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On exposure mistakes, me too! I’m now trying exposure to the right (ETTR). Have you tried this Leanne? I’ve started a thread about it here. Would love to hear about your experiences with ETTR and more generally on tips for reducing exposure mistakes.
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My wife and I had planned a Saturday photo safari all week. Got up on Saturday, and the weather was not good. So… we made the best of it. I like the “city life grit” that this shot depicts.
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Might you tell us more about how you made the best of it with this particular image, Kent?
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It was pretty simple really. I was sitting at a red light in my car. It was snowing hard. I saw the red car approaching and the man walking. I rolled my window done and held my iPhone 8+ up. As the car rolled by, I shot the image using the “Live” function, which rapidly fires off…. I think it’s 15 frames… somewhere around there. Then, I picked the frame that I liked the best and processed it in Snapseed. The order of edits in Snapseed was: crop, HDR Scape, Tune Image, Grainy Film, Brush, Crop again, and one last crop. All of that cropping was tiny steps… trying to decide how much I wanted to leave in. I then imported it into Touch Retouch to remove my car mirror. Here is what the original frame looked like.
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I am so glad you shared the before and after shots, Kent. I love the grittiness and contrast in the processed shot. It is really helpful to understand the steps that bring you to that final ‘vision’ and as someone who still has tons to learn in the post processing area, I love seeing what you did to get there.
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Ha ha – it’s great to see these shots and the stories …. I’ll have to delve into my pics !
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Oops – tried to delete this but don’t know what happened ! Is it me or my ipad???
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I don’t think you can delete posts, Eileen. A few days back I put something in the wrong forum and wanted to delete it. Couldn’t see how to do that, but I discovered that you can edit a post, for some length of time after posting.
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Ooooooo, scary. Would you like to tell us about the difficulties you encountered when making this image, and how you dealt with them?
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- https://www.instagram.com/robert.apple.98/
- https://photography667a.myportfolio.com/
- Allows Edits: Yes
@robertapple- Posts:8856
Allows Edits? YesThat would be more situational then photographically.
I was litteraly standing on my deck when this photo was taken, my dslr as well as our other valuables were packed in vehicles and on trailers ready to evacuate at the call of the fire fighters sitting in my driveway. I was hand held shooting with a rather cheap point and shoot camera that had no image stabilization trying to photograph a moving helicopter, that at times disappeared into the smoke as well as myself being engulfed in it as the wind shifted.
I just kept shooting until I got a reasonable image, and about 10 minutes after this photo was taken, We were evacuated , animals and all.
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I planned a shoot with a young actress friend of mine who wanted to create some images for a possible modelling portfolio and booked a space in a local community centre to set up a pop-up studio. We would have loads of space to take some really creative images, full length with movement as well as headshots. We turned up at the set time with all of my kit only to find that the centre was all locked up with no one in the office. It turns out that someone was off ill and no one was available to come to let us in. So we had to de-camp to my house, move all the furniture out of the sitting room and work in rather more cramped conditions than anticipated, with less scope for creative lighting. We still managed a couple of cool shots though and she was very pleased with the results…
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- https://instagram.com/lightstalking
- https://www.flickr.com/photos/lightstalking
- Allows Edits: Yes
@admin-2- Posts:14337
Allows Edits? YesOh, i went out landscaping last week, finally got a chance. Thing was it was blowing a GALE the first night.
It was so bad, I was actually hanging onto my tripod so my camera didn’t get blown away which kind of defeats the point of the tripod (especially as I like to stretch out the shutter speed).
Anyway, shots from that evening were predicatably soft. Still, I don’t mind this one.
Sharpness is overrated in landscape photography.
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- https://instagram.com/lightstalking
- https://www.flickr.com/photos/lightstalking
- Allows Edits: Yes
@admin-2- Posts:14337
Allows Edits? YesThanks @tojomor Tom – I love shooting at that time of day near the sea. Being there is calming too! 🙂
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Haulashore Island and Fifeshire Rock, Nelson, New Zealand
It was blowing a gale, raining and cold when I made this one at dusk. I was playing with exposure to the right, and thought it would be a challenge to photograph Haulashore Island in the mist and rain. Just behind the island you can see a natural boulder bank that protects the Haven, Nelson’s harbour.
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i went to grand teton national park last year on vacation (a 3 day drive one way) only to find jenny lake was under construction and full of construction equipment. plus it was too cloudy to see the mountains and there were a lot of rain showers… luckily mr.fox and i shared an opinion about the construction equipment.
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