Making a Good Photo Better

It’s no accident that the word photographers use for what happens when the vision before their eyes gets turned into a digital file or a piece of celluloid film: It’s called “capturing” an image. The word conveys that this is an elusive, fleeting, often frustrating endeavor.  This blog post is about the process I went through to capture the gravestone image at the top of this post. Seeing the scene, snapping the shutter, taking a bunch of similar images, then selecting the right one and converting it to what you see here – all of those disparate tasks that together make up a capture.

The scene: Arlington National Cemetery,  north gate (next to the Netherlands Carrillon), on the last Saturday of the year before the “fall back” end of daylight saving time. Since the cemetery opens every day at 8 a.m., this was the day with sunrise closest to the opening time. That’s important for “golden hour” photography: when the sun’s rays are still soft, shadows are long, and the world is quiet (because only photographers and a few others are stirring). (Read my blog post on golden hour here.) 

I arrived a few minutes before opening. (The first and only person in line!) Looking to kill time before the security guards opened the gate, I saw a low rise of gravestones riding up a hill to my right. The sun had just come over the horizon a few minutes before, and I could see here and there a few of the marble stones were catching the direct beams, with most of their neighbors still shadowed. 

Promising, yes, but there was one problem: Between me and these graves was a black cast iron fence with lots of ugly vertical bars interfering with the view. The solution was to stick a big telephoto lens on my camera. This one was a zoom lens mostly good for wildlife. Once I rotated the zoom to a pretty hefty magnified view (420mm), I had an unobstructed view between the iron bars of various clumps of these graves. I spent the next few minutes snapping a couple dozen shots.  Here are a few others I took.

Not bad. But when I looked at them later on my computer, each of them had a close-but-no-cigar look, for different reasons: The first had sun hitting an old-time looking stone that was a little more decorative than I wanted. The second had the same old-timey look plus the stones faced directly to the camera instead of being a little bit obliquely angled. The third had two “unknown soldier” stones at the front, one of them with a nice bit of sun brushing the front, but just to the right of this stone was a big empty area of grass with nothing going on.

Then I noticed this image:

Yes! This one checked all the boxes: The sun was hitting the stone I wanted: a more tersely worded “Unknown” than the “unknown soldier” on many of the others I saw that day. Also, the stones were all facing a bit to the left instead of squarely at the camera, and the focus was pretty good. Only one problem: A tree trunk on the left that didn’t add any interest. A quick crop to a square shape took care of that. Here’s the final.

You’ll see a few other edits on this final image. The original had two gray boxes at the bottom of the image: the tops of two grave stones closest to my camera. I could have “cloned” them out of the image with one of the many replacement tools available in both Lightroom and Photoshop. But I elected  to just darken the foreground so that they’re less obvious. Then I took the central stone and brought up its exposure just a hair to put it in the spotlight. (I could have brightened it up a lot more, but I was going for a more subtle feel.) Finally, I took the rest of the image and nudged the exposure down a bit. You’ll notice, for example, that in the original file you can see the green in the grass but not so much in the final.

A final word on exposure: All the shots in this blog post were taken about 10-15 minutes after sunrise. The scene wasn’t as dark as these images suggest. They’re all technically underexposed. (For the record, my settings were 1/50th of a second, f/8.0, ISO 200.) Here is where a little bit of geeky knowledge helps a lot. My camera (like nearly all other modern cameras) lets you pick how to light meter the subject so you get a good exposure. Most of the time, I set it to “matrix” and the camera averages the light and dark elements in the frame to come up with the “correct” shutter speed and aperture. But there’s another light meter setting called “highlight metering,” where the camera ignores all the dark elements in the frame and gives you an exposure calculated only for the bright spots in the frame. Highlight metering is good for shooting a concert in a dark theater, or a forest scene with dappled light. 

Or in this case, a graveyard just after sunrise.

Postscript: More autumn sunrise photos from Arlington Cemetery can be seen here.