You may not like this very much, or perhaps you will. But I like it a lot. Somehow all the disparate elements have come together to make a tableau – a dramatic arrangement of people such as a group of costumed actors posing silently on stage, or a piece of visual art, or a chance coming together of people who have no idea of the part they play in the tableau or that there is a tableau at all.
Fuji X100F – 1/60th at f2 and ISO 800.
Claude Monet
1840-1926
Water-Lilies
1917
.Oil on canvas
On loan from a private collection
First I was interested in the woman in the fine costume taking a photo of the painting, with herself in the photo. Will she send it to friends to say she was there? Will she sit around with friends and show it to them when she gets back home? Who knows?
For a long time I didn’t see that Monet’s water lily paintings are wonderful: It took me a long while to get past feeling that I saw them before I saw them – meaning that I know what water lilies are, and so the subject matter is a bit simple and obvious.
But then when I stopped, I saw that the leaves of these water lilies don’t look like any I have seen in actuality. They reward the act of looking at them deeply.
If I spend time and look, then I see that the painting is helpful to look at, and to keep looking at.
I say ‘helpful’ because we all need help to get in touch with even a small part of the feeling that is outside the rush of life.
I see so many people in the National Gallery who don’t give more than a moment’s attention any of the paintings. Often they photograph them with their phones and are gone in a trice. I wonder why they go to the galleries at all.
What is the key to unlock their interest?
What surprised me about this painting in the National Gallery is that I have come to expect a certain kind brush mark from Cezanne in his later paintings. This, however, is a more ‘traditional’ mixing of direction to make the composition.
In this painting it appears as though the idea or the creative imposition of certain kinds of brush marks designed to make a point, has not yet developed.
I didn’t know, however, whether this held true because I didn’t know where the painting fitted within the chronologically to either uphold or counter this narrative.
And I learned that 1876, when he painted this, was right before he developed his signature brushwork of uniform marks that are known art-historically as the ‘constructive stroke’ or tache.
So now I know.
I have linked these two images to the image file. So if you click on them you can see them bigger.
This article is about ways to control the exposure of the foreground and background in a photograph.
When a photographer takes a photo with a lens set to a very wide aperture, then the depth of focus is narrow from front to back.
Using a narrow aperture would make much more of the scene from front to back in focus. But here we are talking about separating the foreground from the background.
With a wide aperture set on the lens, the background is rendered blurred and out of focus while the main subject is sharp and in focus.
Lenses with wide maximum apertures tend to be expensive because they require bigger glass in the elements that make up the lens.
An aperture of f1.8 in a short focal length lens is pretty standard. An aperture of f1.4 is less common, and f1.2 is pretty unusual and usually very expensive.
So a wide maximum aperture can blur the background, but it cannot make the background darker or lighter than the main subject.
Flash can make the background darker or lighter than the main subject by illuminating the main subject and setting the exposure of the camera to render the entire scene darker than it would appear to the human eye.
The neat thing about flash is that it overrides the shutter speed you set – at least for the area that the flash covers.
So if you use a tiny flash that only illuminates the subject and isn’t enough to illuminate the whole scene, then the flash exposure speed of around 1/2000th of a second will expose the subject, and the shutter speed – which might be 1/250th of a second will expose the background.
So then, if you manually set the shutter to something faster than 1/250th of a second then less ambient light will get in and the background will be darker than the subject.
But if you don’t use flash then you can use Lightroom Classic because it is pretty good at identifying the subject.
You can mask different part of the scene and then you can alter exposure of the subject and the background independently .
That’s what I did here in the photo above.
Here is the same shot balanced as the camera saw it (and as the human eye would see it).
As you can see, the background is blurred because I used an aperture of f2.8 which is almost the widest aperture possible on the Fuji X100F that I used.
The Fuji is a fixed lens camera with a maximum aperture of f2.0, and if I had shot at that aperture than the people in the background would be slightly more blurred.
And if I had wanted, I could have blurred the background more in Lightroom in the background masked layer.
The masking tool in Lightroom Classic is not perfect, but it is very good at picking out a subject, as you can see here in the screenshot taken from my Lightroom Classic.
To activate the masking feature, click on the dotted circle (the second icon from the right below the word Histogram). Choose ‘subject’ from the three options, and it will highlight in red what it thinks the subject is.
Assuming you like what it chose, put your cursor next to the icon (named Mask 1 here) and you will see an option to create a new mask layer that covers the invert of the subject.
Do that and you have now have two masks – one of the subject and one of the background and you can work with the subject and the background independently.
That means you can sharpen, lighten, darken, blur, and do any of the actions that in the list in the sidebar by using the sliders.
As you can see in both the ‘normal’ shot and the Lightroom masked version, the background is blurred. it is blurred because I used an aperture of f2.8 which is almost the widest aperture possible on the Fuji X100F that I used.
The Fuji is a fixed lens camera with a maximum aperture of f2.0, and if I had shot at that aperture than the people in the background would be slightly more blurred.
And if I had wanted, I could have blurred the background more in Lightroom in the background masked layer.
And that’s it. I learned this technique recently from a YouTube presentation. I can’t remember which one but if I do then I will add a link here.
