A Wider View: using captive animals to get unusual viewpoints

I love photographing wildlife, but sometimes I take time out to shoot captive animals, usually to get shots of particular species for image agencies. Looking through my image database, roughly 20% of my portfolio is made up of captive animals. 

Working with captive animals makes it possible to get shots that would be almost impossible with wildlife. This gives you an opportunity to get  creative and show the creature in a different way. On a recent shoot of captive birds of prey in the Czech republic, I got the opportunity to photograph a Little Owl. The falconers obligingly placed the owl in a natural hollow in a tree which made a nice shot - see below. It's nice and natural looking, with a distant background that's blurred to avoid distractions and lots of texture and detail in the feathers and tree bark made possible by close up, low ISO shooting (something that's pretty rare with the owl's wild cousins). So, overall a pleasing image, but to be honest, not much different from most other captive little owl shots. Time to get a bit more creative...

(Image: Pleasant, but pretty ordinary viewpoint.  Canon EOS 1DX, EF500mm f/4L IS II, 1/200th sec @ f/4, ISO 800, tripod)

I wanted to get something that exploited the approachability of the tame owl but still showed it in the context of it's surrounds. Obviously, getting much closer would give a more dramatic view but how to include some of the environment, and give the shot a different feel to the telephoto images I normally get of wild owls? You'd hardly ever use a very wide angle lens to photograph wild owls - you normally can't get close enough to them - so using one here would be the opposite of a conventional shot. I duly attached a 24mm lens and got close to the owl - about 30cm away. This gave me a view of the owl staring into the lens with the tree trunk some of the forest in the background. Not bad, but could we go further?

Normally, I try to shoot animals at their eye level. Shooting down detaches the viewer from the animal, eye-level puts them into its world. So eye level is 'normal' shooting, and above is not that good... what about below? I got the camera to the base of the tree and pointed upwards at the owl. This gave a much more dramatic viewpoint. The wide angle lens exaggerated perspective making the tree trunk seem taller which gave a sense of the little owl being a small creature. It also gave a view of the forest from a different angle. Below is my first attempt. While I liked the unusual perspective, the white sky and shadowy base of the tree meant that the shot didn't really work. 

(Image: nice idea, shame about the lighting!  Canon EOS 1DX, EF24-105 f/4L @ 28mm, 1/40 sec @ f/8, ISO 1000)

A couple of days later the weather was sunny and I had the opportunity to try the shot again. This time I exposed the image for the sky in order to get a nice blue. This meant that the foreground and owl were very underexposed. From my previous attempt, I was ready for this and had a solution: flash. I used a radio triggered Canon EX600-RT speedlight fitted with a a small softbox (in this case, the very portable but strangely named Rogue Flash Bender and diffusion screen). The radio triggering meant that I could get the flash off camera and avoid the rabbit-in-the-headlights look common in hotshoe-mounted flash images. I was fortunate in having a Voice Activated Light Stand with me to hold the flash in the right place (in this case, the ever obliging Filip Fabian of Tatra Photography www.tatraphotographyworkshop.com). The centre of the soft box was positioned at owl eye level about 30 degrees right of camera, tilted slightly upwards. By having the light source a little off centre, I kept a little shadow on the right hand edge of the hollow which gave the impression of depth. The soft box produced a much less harsh light than bare flash, and created a nicer catchlight in the owl's eyes. I used the flash in TTL mode, but with flash exposure compensation at -1 stop as I didn't want the owl too bright compared to the sky. I also used a wider aperture than previously as I didn't think stopping down to f/8 had made for a good image in my previous attempt. Here's the resulting image:

(Image: Canon EOS 1DX, EF24-105 f/4L IS @ 24mm, 1/250 sec @ f/4, ISO 100, EX600-RT speedlight with small softbox)

There were a few things that might have improved the image further. I would have liked to have used an even wider lens to further enhance the perspective effect, but sadly I didn't have room to pack one. A polarizing filter would also have given me more control over the sky colour, but I'd managed to leave this behind. Even without these additions, I think the image is more eye catching than a straight-forward telephoto shot of the owl in the tree hollow.

Adventures in LAB space: selective colour correction in a hurry

When I need to correct colours in an image using Photoshop, I generally work in the LAB colour space. A lot of people seem to avoid LAB and stick to either AdobeRGB or sRGB, but LAB has a number of advantages and can help you do some things a lot faster than the more usual colour spaces. Here, I look a little bit at what Lab is (the theory…) and show how it can be used to target and change specific colours in an image. I’m probably shooting myself in the foot when I say this but… you can skip to the practical example without reading the theory bit – you don’t need to understand the theory to use Lab, I just think it’s nice to know why things happen the way they do.

One important thing: you’ll need to view the images below on a properly calibrated monitor to see the adjustments correctly.

The theory bit: What is Lab?

Well, let’s start with what a colour space is. A colour space is model that your camera, Photoshop, and various other applications and devices use to work out what colour, and how bright or dark, things are. You’re probably familiar with the RGB method of representing colour – here, every point (think pixel, in practical, if slightly inaccurate, terms) has a separate Red, Green and Blue value. These three values together define a unique colour and that’s how your camera records each pixel’s colour – it saves a Red, Green and Blue value. The values usually go from 0 to 255 for each colour. If Red, Green and Blue are all 0, then that represents black. If they’re all 255, that’s white. If Red is 255 and the other colours are 0, then that’s a really bright, vibrant Red… and so on for various combinations of the colours.

An RGB colour space is just a three dimensional graph with three axis (Red, Green, Blue… surprise, surprise) that maps RGB input values to colours. In order that everything (camera, monitor etc.) are speaking the same language and know what colour a particular RGB value should correspond to, they use a standard, documented colour space. (Actually, there is a bit more to it than that – to ensure that the blue of a blueberry as seen by the camera matches the blue of the blueberry when the photograph taken is displayed on a monitor we also need something that takes into account each device’s characteristics and their effect on the way it records/displays colour – this is called a device dependent colour profile, in case you’re interested… but we’ll ignore this complication for now to make things simpler).The two most common RGB standards are the sRGB and AdobeRGB color spaces.  AdobeRGB is structured to represent a wider range of colours than sRGB – we say that AdobeRGB has a wider gamut, to use the appropriate technical term -  although it isn’t possible to display all of the colours in AdobeRGB on a standard monitor or print, so you probably won’t see a noticeable difference unless you have a high-end graphics monitor designed for AdobeRGB.

So, having defined what a colour space is, it’s time to look at what’s special about Lab. Like RGB, Lab colour space has three different values but they represent rather different things. The first value, L, represents lightness – how bright or dark a point is. (In RGB each of the colour values represents a colour at a particular brightness R=100, G=0,B=0 is a brighter and more vivid red than R=10, G=0, B=0. In RGB, there’s no separate lightness channel).

The other two Lab values -  ‘a’ and ‘b’ - represent colour. Both must have values between -128 and +127. In a, -128 represent pure Green, 127 represents pure Red. The values in between are how green or red a particular colour is, with 0 being neutral. The ‘b’ value works in the same way, but has Blue at -128 and Yellow at 127. (Remember that complication of device profiles we mentioned when talking about RGB? Well, lab doesn’t suffer from this – it’s device independent. In fact, it’s so independent that it gets used a lot under the hood of programs such as Photoshop, especially when you are converting an image from one colour space to another).

Lab has some nice properties from an image editing point-of-view that RGB colour spaces just don’t have. Remember how RGB wraps brightness information into the Red, Green and Blue values? Well, that means that when you change how bright or dull something is with an image editing program working in RGB you also change its colour as well (have you ever noticed that colour fades and shifts a little as you turn up the brightness…?). That’s not a nice side effect. In Lab, you can change how bright things are by changing the L value without causing any change to their colour.

Lab is a very wide gamut colour space - it can represent a very large range of colours, more than sRGB and AdobeRGB. This allows us to have many more shades of, say, purple than in the other spaces. That’s very handy when we are trying to make up for the limitations of our cameras – we can stretch out a colour in Lab to give the impression of subtle variations in shades.

Lab’s wide gamut also makes it easier to select a specific colour or colour range using, say, curves in Photoshop than if we were working in RGB (which is the aspect we’ll look at in the practical section below).

Lab was designed to represent colour in as close a way to the human visual system as possible. Shifting colour shades in the a and b channels gives very natural looking changes rather than the sometimes weird effects you get from moving the  Red, Green and Blue sliders in RGB space.

If a=0 and b=0 in Lab, then you have a neutral grey – the brightness of the grey is controlled by the Lab value. This makes it much easier to target neutrals in an image and monitor them for changes (very handy if you’re a people photographer and want to keep skin tone carefully controlled while you’re editing colour).

The practical bit: fixing unrealistic colours  (or ‘Do you have something for my bird – he’s a bit off-colour’)

Let’s start with the problem. This image of a Red Kite on a fence post is suffering from a washed out and generally insipid sky. The sky looked nice and blue on the day that I took the shot, but in bright sunlight my camera couldn’t reproduce the strong blues  and also cope with getting the shadow details  as accurately as I’d have liked. I had to settle for either a darker, bluer sky with not much shadow detail elsewhere, or shadow detail and a washed out sky (note that I said washed out rather than burnt out - Lab won't magically fix loss of detail in overexposed areas). The grass also looks a slightly unrealistic colour, sort of yelowish green – as humans we’re especially sensitive to slight nuances of green, so this is more noticeable than I’d like. The bird itself is fine. So, how can we quickly fix the sky (a problem with blues) and the grass (a problem with greens and yellows) without changing the appearance of the bird?

You could carefully select the sky in Photoshop, using magic wand, lasso or another tool and push up the blue saturation in the sky. Then you could  select the grass and work on that, maybe using  Color Balance / Hue Saturation / fiddling about with the RGB channels. This would no doubt make the photo look better, but all that selecting and adjusting does take time, patience and a degree of skill if it’s to look natural.

So, here’s an alternative using Lab and one curves adjustment layer…

Once you’ve got your image into Photoshop, the first step is to convert it into Lab colour. You can do this either from Image -> Mode -> Lab  or Edit->Convert to profile then select Lab Color as the target space.

Next,  create a curves adjustment layer (Layers->New Adjustment Layer->Curves). When you open the curves  you’ll see the L channel of Lab displayed, something like this:

First things first... if you look at the icons running down the left hand side of the dialogue box above, you’ll notice an exclamation mark on the bottom one. This is telling you that Photoshop has only created an approximate (rather than accurate) graph to save time. I’d advise you to remedy this by clicking on the icon – that tells Photoshop to go back and try harder. More importantly, you’ll now get an accurate graph to work with. As you can see from the drop down box second from the top, we’re currently looking at Lightness – that’s how bright or dark things are and won’t help us fix colour problems. To fix colour we need to change to the a or b channels, so select one of these from the drop down menu.

Here’s the b channel graph (ignore the red labels that I’ve added for a moment...)

The lefthand icon that looks like a pointing hand with two arrows is key to finding out what we need to change. Click this and then slowly move the mouse around the photo itself – you’ll see a dot moving on the graph to show you the b value for whatever point on the picture your mouse is over. You’ll soon notice that the grass colour values are all in the region I’ve labelled G and the sky colour values are all in the region I’ve labelled S. So these are the parts of the curve we need to adjust if we want to change grass and sky respectively.

Start by clicking along the diagonal line to add some anchor points either side of the S and G regions – the purpose of these is to keep the rest of the curve in place when we start adjusting G and S. Now click in the middle of S and drag down or up and observe the change – dragging down immediately intensifies the blues in the sky – just what we wanted! You might need to add a few more anchor points to keep the rest of the line in place, as I’ve done here. Try the same in with a point in the G area – this time, dragging the point down makes the grass less yellow. Note that the other colours in the picture don’t change – just the sky and grass. You can see my adjusted curve below. That was certainly a lot quicker than making lots of selections and adjustments.

(Those of you who have stayed awake up to this point might notice that I've also squished  the bottom left and top right of the original diagonal line in towards the centre just a bit - this intensifies the colours a little more) You can now do the same kind of adjustment to the  with the a channel. As it happens, in this particular picture the b curve is really all you need – you’ll get a feel for this once you’ve worked on a few images. In our Red Kite photo, all the colour we need to change lies in b which, if you remember, represents blue and yellow. If I wanted to make the grass a more vibrant green, rather than just less yellow, then I’d adjust also  the a channel (the a channel holds all the data about reds and greens).

Here are the before and after images side-by-side for comparison . 

The approach described here won’t work on every image, but it does work on the majority. Hopefully, it illustrates one advantage of working in Lab colour space.