Smog in Beijing

[Ophelia Bott]

I've just returned from sunny but smoggy Beijing and was wondering if anyone had any tips for photographing in the smog? I guess the same question could apply to foggy days in the UK. I tried to decrease the F-stop and sneak in some colour (cherry blossom for instance) but some photos look grey and washed out.

Suggestions for improvements please? Thanks

[ianbutty]

Hi "Ophelia", welcome to the forum. [I ought to ban you immediately for that pseudonym - lowering the tone the forum!]

A couple of immediate thoughts on this. Thankfully never had to deal with anything quite as bad as what you saw in Beijing. The first thing I would use for dealing with any form of haze is to try a circular polarising filter on the camera, that can help make things look clearer.

The next thing I would do would be not in camera but in post production. Hazy images usually mean that the full range of brightnesses have been compressed into the middle of the histogram. So the trick is to do a curves or levels adjustment to effectively spread that range out. What do you use to edit your images? If it is photoshop, do a curves adjustment move the black and white end points in to the edge of the histogram and possibly tweak the curve to have a slight "S" shape to it.

If you are not familiar with that kind of adjustment let us know what editing software you use and I'll try to talk you through this in a bit more detail.

In the mean time - anyone else on the forum got any advice for Alison.... er... sorry.... I mean "Ophelia"?

[geoffpix]

Shoot early and shoot late so that you are using the smog to get really good 'golden hour' images. The other thing is to photograph at night. It will work for certain lighting.

Shooting vistas during the day with that sort of smog is a waste of time. There will always be a shooter who's waited for rain to clear the smog and get the blue sky images. Use the smoggy mid day to catch up on sleep.

An easy way to help the images you've got is by using a film pack filter such as AS Exposure. It will improve the colour somewhat and give more depth of tone into the shadows. It's a combination of an s-curve adjustment layer and a saturation layer. I would also play with grad filters in post to see if they can help and you could also just use a warmup filter on some shots to mimick an early morning/evening shot.

[NRT]

I was in Beijing March/April and it was bad, diffraction caused by smog was making all large DOF pictures soft. As Geoff said, it is pointless trying to compete with images that were taken in much better conditions, on these sort of days look for opportunities in the hutongs of chinese characters for example. I got some good shots of the early evening "Snack Street" in Wanfujing, plus some nice early morning images at Tiantan of people exercising in the park. Btw, a polarising filter does not help in this case, I know, I tried it! Mind you, you should have done much better than those two images you have shown here. These are mine. Summer Palace was far worse than Tiananmen Square this year, Last visit I took about 600 shots at the Summer Palace, this year only 36, just wasn't worth the effort.

As far as your images are concerned some more details would held the analysis; camera, lens, shutter speed etc.

[Ophelia Bott]

Thanks to everyone for their comments, I've never posted a question before and am really pleased that there are folk out there happy to make suggestions

I've put another picture on, it's very grainy due to the reduced file size but you get the idea - my camera is Cannon 450D, lens is the shorter one of the 2 that I own, shooting mode program AE (I have to say I don't know what this means), TV 1/400, AV 14.0, Exposure compensation -1, ISO speed 200, focal length 46.0mm, white balance mode auto (I think I understand all these things in principle!).

Is there anything in these setting that I've obviously done wrong?

Thanks very much again for your advice!

[NRT]

Hmm, that picture seems to have an extreme sharpening halo, plus a couple of dust spots in the sky, as well as being underexposed. To be honest, from what you have said about your camera I would suggest that you would be far better off with a quality compact. Something like the Lumix TZ7 would enable you to take much better quality photos than you current set up, just stick it in auto mode and point and shoot, plus is it much. much lighter. Alternatively, stick your 450D in manual mode and practice with the settings (i.e. iso, shutter speed and aperture) until you understand what they mean.

Moving up from a point and shoot to a DSLR is like going from a normal road car to a racing car; there is the potential to go faster but unless you learn how to drive it, the chances are you'll spin off at the first corner! You need to practice more, at home not on your travels when you may not get the chance of the shot again.

[ianbutty]

NRT,
To be fair to Ophelia, I think some of the problems you are seeing in that last image are due to her compressing the image to be able to upload it to the website. I've been tweeking the image upload setting because some of the larger images have not been uploading correctly and looking at the JPG quality levels on image it looks like the image has been very heavily compressed to deal with it.

Yes the image is under exposed. Not sure about the dust spot impossible to tell at this resolution but I think the dark 'square' is jpg artifacting.

Ophelia,
I know you are a newbie with DSLR cameras and this trip is really your first chance to have a play with you 450D. With that in mind I think the best general advice is really to keep shooting and start working through different settings. Concentrate on one particular setting on the camera at a time until it becomes second nature to you and you know exactly when to use and just as importantly when not to use it. In this example you state that the image had -1 exposure compensation. That is what has caused the image to be be underexposed. You camera's metering system will always attempt to get an 18% grey exposure and in this case I suspect 18% grey would have been about right. As I think you know the exposue compensation will either lighten or darken the exposure away from that value. The best way to use it is to set your camera so that it displays a histogram on the display. When you take a shot, take a look at the histogram and you'll be able to see definatively whether an image is under exposed (histogram too far to the left/black side) or overexposed (histogram hitting the right side and flashing clipping warnings on the image). If you see that you can then use your exposure compensation to adjust for this and retake the shot. Eventually you will be able to look at a scene and decide before even taking your first image whether you will need exposure compensation.

I think the other question I have to ask is do you shoot in RAW mode? That is something that you will want to look at, as it gives you more control over the final image than a jpg would. And if you ever asire to sell images in the future some stock libraries are insisting that images were first captured in RAW mode. But that's a subject for another time!

Keep shooting!