edits | bre.likes.trees
First of all I want to say that this is an excellent composition. The low perspective puts you in the lower third of the image which balances nicely with the background mountain and sky. The use of an aperture of f/4 provided a nice separation of the subject, the foreground and the background.
Original image, unedited, exported from RAW file in Adobe Lightroom. I posted the Lightroom histogram of this image below. Everything about the exposure is good with the exception of the hard highlight clipping on the right-hand side. The clipping comes from the sky portion of the image and with this much of it edits of this area will be limited.
Checks and Edits
Lightroom Highlight Check. Once I imported the image into Lightroom I wanted to see what we had to work with in the clipped sky area. I reduced the highlights as far as possible (-100) and then reduced the overall exposure by 1.5 stops. This image reflect both of these changes and, as you can see, the sky reveals very little additional detail other than a bit of mist/clouds above the ridgeline. It may be possible to use this underexpose image and layer it on top of the normally exposed image in Photoshop and blend just the sky portion to add this detail but I felt that it did not add enough interest to warrant doing so.
Image Histogram and Treatment panels for this image below.
My edits. I saw this image going a few different ways and provided example of each below. Obviously, there are an infinite amount of approaches to an image but considering the season and what I felt was wanting to be portrayed these are my takes.
A little bit of a crop to center you in the image and to make the “horizon” level and then a cool tone edit to the image to emphasize the season. I felt that the texture of the tree, both inside and outside, needed some definition so I pushed the shadows in and on it to do that. I also brought up the shadows and saturation of your socks and shoes as I I liked having them visible and contrasting with the tree rather than getting lost in the shadows. I added a tiny bit of exposure to you from the waist up and some saturation to the yellow jacket.
A common approach to editing for many Instagrammers is to find an editing style that fits the season and then edit everything during that time to look very close in color and tone. Often colors of clothing are changed in Photoshop to maintain a consistent look regardless of what actually happened.
A similar crop but a more moody image. Not as much of a cool tone but a very similar feel to it. This looks more like an image taken on film to me. A bit of grain could be added to further dirty it up if you wanted.
A bit warmer with some added exposure and saturation in the reds and oranges. This brought out some additional color in the rocks and the trees immediately above the “horizon”. This option could be taken is the image was taken in the fall to emphasize the seasonal color changes.
My notes:
This is a new camera and you will have to put some time in to get comfortable with changing the settings both in places where they are easy to do and in spontaneous, not-so-easy to do places (such as being on a hike). Additionally, the A7RIV has a lot of dynamic range and you will learn over time to take advantage of that.
Consider using a tripod. Even a short travel tripod is better than none in some instances. This would have been an amazing image to set up the camera on the tripod, expose for the sky (this would have underexposed everything else but that is OK) and shoot the scene without you in it. Then you would adjust your settings to expose for the tree, go out and take your place in the scene and shoot that image. In post you could then exposure blend the sky from the first shot into the second image and you would have gained a lot of dynamic range that the camera is simply not able to do on its own in a single image. This CAN be done in a single image but it would require the use of a graduated ND filter over the top half of the image to reduce the brightness of the sky but I would not recommend this as graduated ND filters are expensive and very annoying to use in the field (just think about carrying a bunch of 4” squares of glass with you on a hike and then having to get the holder onto the lens and then find the correct one, and get the line of the graduation in the right place,…. it sucks. I owned a Lee filter system like this for awhile and eventually sold it as I hated carrying all of the pieces around.
And , lastly but certainly not leastly, the most important thing you can do for your photography is to never shoot in Automatic mode and to use back button focusing. Both of these changed photography so much for me. If you would like some recommendations or assistance with either please let me know.
Greg