He was at Bond Street Underground station a couple of weeks ago, playing slide guitar. I recognised Ry Cooder’s Paris Texas theme as I came down the escalator. There must be a lot of ways to play it wrong but George played very well and I stopped to listen.
He’s a big personality and seen and done a lot of things and somehow in all that, coming through was this man that I liked.
I took his photograph, and didn’t look at the settings – a mistake I make too often. So the shots weren’t sharp.
So today he was there, just packing up. He asked me how I was getting on and I checked the settings on my camera and had another go.
When I looked at the photo after I took it, I could see he looked serious. And what else – maybe this, maybe that.
I remember a study by Kyoto University about six years ago that found that young people had a different ability to detect subtleties of expression compared to older people.
George wanted to see the photo and when I showed it to him in the LCD, he said he looked tired. I said we’d bump into one another again and I could show him how the photo looked on the page.
I can give him a print if he likes it on seeing it again.
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
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.
Using Lightroom Classic
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.
A man with unkempt grey hair sits on the pavement by the exit to Oxford Circus underground station. He sits bent over, wrapped in a blue blanket, with his legs straight out. He wears Nike Air Max 95 Retro trainers. A shallow tray is on the ground by his left foot.
Behind him is a black wheelchair and a Council rubbish bin. The wheelchair stands partly on strewn cardboard, wet in places.
On the cardboard is an empty tray, a paper carrier bag with string handles, a plastic bottle, a piece of thick brown material, and a piece of flimsy red material.
A tall man wearing a brown and black padded jacket is walking along the pavement and seems to look towards the man on the ground. He is hand in hand with a woman wearing a pale blue coat who looks down at the ground in front of her.
Two women are walking while involved in conversation. One has her hand and arm up expressively.
Further away, a woman is walking with a child and pushing a small pushchair with red cover. A man in a bright yellow shell jacket is three-quarters turned back, perhaps in conversation with the woman behind him.
Supplication is the act of humbly, earnestly, or desperately asking a deity or someone in a position of power for a favour, mercy, or help. It is an emotional plea rooted in deep dependence and respect.
Look just below the phone at the extreme bottom left of this photo, and the man with his hands raised.
Look at the enlarged a crop below to show the detail.
The explanation I heard about Krishna consciousness (see this post) suggests that it is not a personal request but an opportunity to be a better servant of the plan of the divine.
