Now that our babygirl has reached the age of three weeks, our life is slowly getting back on track and I can start thinking about photography again. I went out twice over the weekend because I really wanted to photograph the heather in full bloom. I have been photographing this small area for a long time now (see my recent blogposts), but the archive still lacked some decent shots with purple as the main color. Friday morning started with a slight drizzle. Nothing worrying, as the sky featured a lot of small puffy clouds that were perfect candidates for being hit by the colors of the rising sun. A low band of cloud cover decided to rain on my parade and blocked the sun when I needed it most.
So no spectacular pink sky to match the pink/purple hues of the heather. It was good fun though and I made mental notes of promising vantage points. I went back on Saturday evening and did not even mind to forego Match of the Day for it! Again the sky looked promising after a day of hard wind and heavy downpours. But in the end, when the sun finally hit the treeline, almost all clouds had gone and the sky was featureless. Nonetheless, the pinkish light after sunset that is so hard to see with the naked eye but is perfectly recorded by the camera, stressed the beautiful colors of the heather even more. I recently learned that subject colors that match the color (or temperature, if you wish) of the ambient light will really pop in your shots. Now I can conform that is true.
I brought my Colorchecker Passport and included it in some of my photographs in order to get the whitebalance just right in postprocessing. Somehow, my eyes and Photoshop are fooled by the large amount of magenta in the photographs and all images I had processed from the Friday session were off as far as colors are concerned. Too yellow, too red, too green or too blue. I re-processed the same shots three times on three different days and just could not seem to get it right. With the Colorchecker Passport, that problem was easily solved and I was surprised by the result. The only thing left to do for now is explain to my wife who this beautiful Heather is that I so often talk about and visited twice during the weekend…
Heather in Bloom; Canon 5D Mark III w. 17-40/4L; 3.2s at F22 and ISO100; ND Grad filter, tripod
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