top of page
No tags yet.
Tag Cloud

Maintaining atmosphere

Atmosphere is what defines an image. It’s what ultimately gives it purpose and is the element that draws in a viewer and determines if they ‘connect’ with it or not. It defines the seasons, the time of day and influences how an audience perceives your subject. When you see a potential photograph, it’s likely that it is the atmosphere of the scene which drew your creative eye and made you want to make an image. Once recognised though, it is important to accurately re-create what you saw with the camera and this can be the tricky part. Exposure is often the deciding factor, with too bright an image likely lacking the drama seen on-location and an underexposed shot failing to convey the sense of tranquillity or liveliness that was hoped for in the final image. In this article we discuss the methods of recognising and representing the factors which make up any given atmosphere…

Reading the light

It all begins at the moment we look at a scene and think “I wanna shoot that!” Before doing anything else, this is the time to take a second to analyse the image in front of you and figure out why it caught your eye. It’s often tempting to jump right in and start ‘snapping’, randomly firing the shutter and hoping you’ll stumble on the elusive ‘magic’ quality you think you’ve spotted, but slowing down and observing how the ambient lighting is affecting your subjects is the perfect way of judging your exposure and tuning it to accentuate the required atmospheric elements. Doing so now gives you a good starting point to work on later.

Let’s take an example image; this misty woodland was a must-shoot subject as the seasonal haziness was creating a quiet but also sombre mood. With misty scenes such as this you have to be aware of how your camera is exposing your shots, being mindful of how the image brightness is setting up the initial tone of the composition. The usual brightness of mist itself can often fool metering systems into underexposure as our cameras try to render it a mid-tone grey. This then has a tendency to create a muddy, murky-looking image, which isn’t especially pleasant to look at (since our eyes ‘know’ mist shouldn’t be grey.) If it was a quiet serene image you were trying to create, which was the intention here, this can be spoiled by the murky qualities enforced by this kind of underexposure – it doesn’t look intentional, it just looks a bit depressing! Importantly though, there is also the possibility of intentionally choosing an exposure which doesn’t fit the scene. Always ensure you are exposing your image with the final atmosphere in mind: envision how you want the shot to affect your viewer and create the shot accordingly, taking control of the settings the camera offers you.

In our second example we have a classic sunrise image. When looking at this type of shot we naturally expect to see deep, rich golden colours, because that’s what we all see when we look at a sunrise in reality. With low, directional light however comes extreme contrast and deep, dark shadows. If the photographer is not mindful of where their camera is metering from it is very likely to result in over-exposure, stripping the scene of saturated colour and bestowing a washed-out, deflated appearance. Even if there is no obvious loss of highlight detail, as clearly visible in this example, a shot can still suffer from weakened colours. While a lot of these issue may stem from carelessness or a lack of understanding of exposure, it is possible to be so technically minded so as to see that the histogram is ‘perfect’ with no clipping and assume the resulting image will have as much impact as can be seen in-the field.

At the computer

In the digital age, it is the editing stage that demonstrate the photographer’s lack of understanding of atmosphere more than any other phase of the workflow. Once you have captured the image in the way you feel is appropriate, you have to apply any edits you make in a way that is tailored for the tone of the scene. If we take our misty scene again, it helps to understand that the low contrast and muted tones are the elements which are fundamental to ‘look’ that we all love about mist and fog. It’s surprisingly easy to get carried away by the impact of those elements and attempt to add to the image’s presence by boosting contrast and saturation in order amplify the ‘wow- factor’. Unfortunately this treatment will remove the aforementioned essential aspects of the classic foggy ambience and have the reverse effect to the one intended. The proper approach with this kind of scene is to focus on preserving the delicate tones and usually very little editing is required, aside from minor tweaks to colour balance.

Regarding colour, this is another area which is critical for atmosphere. While it can be very advantageous to be creative with White Balance, when it comes to a strongly coloured shot such the dawn photo, a commitment needs to be made to enhancing and working around those hues and using them as the asset they are. Sometimes dawn scenes are dominated by cool hues such as blues and greens, but where we have a ‘hot’ sunrise, with the sun itself visible in the frame, it is vital that colour manipulation is applied to emphasise the high contrast and low-kelvin colour a viewer would associate with those conditions. A strongly saturated situation such as this doesn’t benefit from colour ‘correction’, where software is used to generate a totally balanced colour tone as this neutralises the deep reds and oranges the human eye would see looking at a landscape such as that in the example image. This is a perfect example of when technical perfection is definitely not the key to success.

Conclusions

Ultimately photographic style is a matter of individual taste and what one person sees as atmospheric isn’t universal. However, if an image that is true to the conditions you faced in-the-field is what you’re after, observing and preserving the components that define the mood they create, at both the shooting and editing stages, will yield more success.

bottom of page