PHOTOSHOOT : VENUS AT SUNSET

MAY 13, 2020

THEME

The theme for this shoot is Venus at Sunset. I had not planned this session in advance. As I was sitting outside with my family, I noticed that Venus was very bright in a particularly beautiful evening sky and I decided to take some photos using my cell phone (as it was convenient).

PHOTOS

I try to encourage students to take at least 10 solid photos in a photo session. One can easily exceed that number.

Below is a preview of all the photos that I took excluding the photos that I deleted in my first pass through. Photos that I deleted include most blurry photos. I also tried to go through very similar photos and keep the best one but only if it is an easy and quick decision.

One of the goals when doing any shoot is trying to have some variety in the photos. That can be challenging when the subject is high up in the sky. I moved around getting photos from different locations/angles which did help separate Venus from the neighbourhood homes. I also tried to use the nice tree in some photos. I also took some photos focusing on the dark blue cloud near the bottom right. Of course, if I had more time, I would have walked away from my yard and used different lanscapes for my horizon.

TOP FIVE PHOTOS

Here are the five photos (20% of original size) that I like best or I think have the most potential for editing. Note that nothing stops one from having a top six or seven photos.

PHOTO #5

Description: I find this photo really allows you to see just how bright Venus is in the sky. It also shows the darkness of the large cloud at the bottom right. The top of the houses lines up with the bottom third line of the photo.

PHOTO #4

Description: I like this photo as it shows Venus in a large beautiful sky. One can really see the cloud patterns. There is also an opportunity to crop the photo to keep only the sky.

PHOTO #3

Description: I like this photo because it contains only Venus and a nice blue textured sky. This is an excellent candidate for some artistic editing.

PHOTO #2

Description: I like how the tree fills the left side of the photo and Venus is just next to it. One can even imagine one of the branches reaching towards or pointing at Venus. I was a little limited on my angle of I would have tried other similar shots.

PHOTO #1

Description: My favourite shot is the first one I took that evening. It shows an interesting contrast between a peaceful flowly sky and a busy residential area. The sky is quite beautiful with the clouds showing some three dimensional form. The tree on the left is well balanced with the dark cloud on the right. I do wish that Venus was a bit brighter. Also, the horizon is a little low for the rule of thirds but I do like the blue sky gradient at the top. And of course, one can crop the photo.

EDITS

I do not always edit my photos. It depends how much time I have. I have only done an edit session on one of the above photos at this point in time.

EDIT #1 – BLURRED BACKGROUND

Description: As you can see in the original photo on the left, there is some grain in the background created by my camera. I opted to blur the entire background in order to smooth that out. While not too visible at this scale, it also had the consequence of slightly increasing the glow around Venus. So we can now ask ourselves : Is this still a photo of Venus or is it an art piece of Venus?

Tool used: A simple gaussian blur of everything except Venus.

EDIT #2 – BLUE

Description : When I first looked over the photos, I immediately found that the photos were not as bright blue as I remembered the sky. The photos had more grey in them. So I corrected (maybe overcorrected) that issue. Note that this work was done on top of the photo from Edit #1.

Tool used: Paint.net’s Adjustments > Curves on RGB mode

EDIT #3 – DARK

Description: Working with the result of Edit #2, I was hoping to increase the contrast between Venus and the sky. I changed the Brightness of the photo without realizing that such a nice glowing blue would be the result. This image is quite nice when it fills the entire screen.

Tool used : Paint.net’s Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast with Brightness set to 0.

DETAILS

ORGANIZATION

I like to organize my photo sessions using a folder for all photos, another for the best photos and then a folder for the edits.

FILE SIZE

All combined, the photos in this shoot take up over 100 megabytes of storage. That is a lot and a good reason for you to delete photos that are not useful. Some people would suggest only keeping the Top 5.

SIZE OF THIS DOCUMENT

When I initially created this document, I did not resize any photos. The size of it was 26 megabytes which is quite big for one document.

I then used Paint.net to resize the Top 5 photos above to 20% of their original size and the Edit photos above to 12% of their original size. (Note that I did not change the original photos, only the ones in this document.)

The result, was a reduction in file size from 26 megabytes to 5 megabytes, which is much more manageable.

Tool used : Paint.net’s Image > Resize