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Heat haze - anything you can do about it?

jedibrain
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · Heat haze - anything you can do about it?

Soccer team played on a turf field yesterday. The heat shimmer was intense....

Looking across the field, I could see that air rippling all the way up past the top crossbar on the goal. As expected, most shots on the field were pretty soft. Some had to be thrown away, others were OK for use but not up to normal sharpness.

It was overcast and cold. I was shooting Tv of 1/1600, aperture wide open which was 4.5-5.6 for my lens (EF100-400VII). I could not see where SS made a notable difference in the results. Anything else that can be done in these conditions to improve sharpness?

Brian

Sep 08, 2024 at 12:00 PM

artsupreme
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · Heat haze - anything you can do about it?

The closer action should look a little better but there’s nothing you can do. I’ve tried faster Ss and stopping down but nothing works. It’s the cold air meeting the warm air coming off the turf.

Sep 08, 2024 at 12:03 PM

RoamingScott
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · Heat haze - anything you can do about it?

The only thing that can help is elevating your position relative to the subjects, as haze is worse the closer you are to the ground/turf.

Sep 08, 2024 at 12:10 PM

rscheffler
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · Heat haze - anything you can do about it?

Pray for wind, stand instead of kneeling or sitting (though I do prefer a lower angle) and wait for the action to be relatively close so you're shooting through less of the heat waves. Or only shoot games on natural turf. Extreme solution: win the lottery, buy your team/school/community a real turf field and also pay for the upkeep.

From a photographer's perspective, Field Turf (and similar) should be banned.

Even if your conditions were cold and overcast, Field Turf type turf might have been 'preheated' earlier by direct sunlight, the heat from which would have been stored by the millions of tiny black bits of ground up tires. These constitute the 'soil' of the field and provide its cushioning effect, but unfortunately act as a heat reservoir that gradually releases and causes the heat waves.

Probably the only solution would be an active cooling system under the field built into the concrete pad on which the turf sits, but of course would greatly add to cost and complexity (and likely wouldn't entirely eliminate the effect). A bonus could be that removing the turf in the winter could repurpose the field as an outdoor ice pad for sports such as skating/hockey that is less dependent on ideal winter weather conditions.

Sep 08, 2024 at 12:49 PM

johnvanr
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p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · Heat haze - anything you can do about it?

You can only weep as you import the images

Sep 08, 2024 at 01:42 PM

LuckyStrike88
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p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · Heat haze - anything you can do about it?

years ago the day after I got my 300 2.8 I promptly headed down to a local Heron lagoon... Herons everywhere and I shot 100's of glorious images (It was July and quite warm and I shot between 10 AM - 12:30)
Got home and not a single image was usable .. fuzzy, not even focused ...Thought my new $$$ lens was a dud
Thats the day I learned about atmospherics

Sep 08, 2024 at 02:04 PM

Imagemaster
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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · Heat haze - anything you can do about it?

You can get heat haze at temperatures far below freezing. You can get it in the Arctic in the middle of winter.

Sep 08, 2024 at 02:43 PM

jedibrain
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p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · Heat haze - anything you can do about it?

RoamingScott wrote:
The only thing that can help is elevating your position relative to the subjects, as haze is worse the closer you are to the ground/turf.

I do shoot standing. I shot one other turf game last Spring from bleachers, but there was still a lot of haze.
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rscheffler wrote:
Pray for wind, stand instead of kneeling or sitting (though I do prefer a lower angle) and wait for the action to be relatively close so you're shooting through less of the heat waves. Or only shoot games on natural turf. Extreme solution: win the lottery, buy your team/school/community a real turf field and also pay for the upkeep.

From a photographer's perspective, Field Turf (and similar) should be banned.

Even if your conditions were cold and overcast, Field Turf type turf might have been 'preheated' earlier by direct sunlight, the heat from which would have been stored by the...Show more →

Its been hot here a long time in the Midwest, and yesterday was very cool, like in the 50s at game time. As soon as I saw the heat shimer 10' in the air, I knew it was going to be ugly.
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Imagemaster wrote:
You can get heat haze at temperatures far below freezing. You can get it in the Arctic in the middle of winter.

Truth! You can often see it coming up off the snow on a sunny day in the dead of winter. Its heat differential that creates it, not absolute temperatures. A lot of days you can see it coming off the roofs of houses as well, hot or cold.

Thanks all for the help. I figured it was futile. But wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something.

Brian

Sep 08, 2024 at 03:49 PM

AmbientMike
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p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · Heat haze - anything you can do about it?

I've been paying more attention after seeing these threads, one of the worst days here more like 50° F in February or maybe50°'s in March. Usually 95° in July not that bad. Maybe if it heats up a bit or after dark after DST you can get something

I do a lot of macro and don't have much trouble, so I'd agree on trying to get closer

Sep 09, 2024 at 01:14 PM

jedibrain
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p.1 #10 · p.1 #10 · Heat haze - anything you can do about it?

AmbientMike wrote:
I've been paying more attention after seeing these threads, one of the worst days here more like 50° F in February or maybe50°'s in March. Usually 95° in July not that bad. Maybe if it heats up a bit or after dark after DST you can get something

I do a lot of macro and don't have much trouble, so I'd agree on trying to get closer

Closer helps a lot. But they don't let me on the field!

. I'd get embarrassed out there anyway as they are all better athletes than I am.

Heat shimmer is not a problem every day. The last time on this field it was cold at the beginning of spring and cold that day, and with everything in equilibirum no issues at all.

Summer days blacktop and concrete can reflect or re-radiate the sun which causes bad photography conditions. Just like the black pellets and concrete under the turf did the other day. Warm morning air on cool lakes/ponds is another time, or vice versa when the water is warm and the air is cold. If you look for it, you'll find it. For Macro there is not much atmosphere between your lens and the subject to cause a problem though.

Brian

Sep 09, 2024 at 01:54 PM

lighthound
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p.1 #11 · p.1 #11 · Heat haze - anything you can do about it?

From the sounds of it, you did everything you possibly could have to reduce this PITA phenomenon.
It's one of the most frustrating things I've ever encountered in photography. Almost lost a good camera and lens over it a few times.
My anger management classes have helped save me a lot of money.

Sep 09, 2024 at 01:59 PM

robert_in_ca
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p.1 #12 · p.1 #12 · Heat haze - anything you can do about it?

johnvanr wrote:
You can only weep as you import the images

Been there one too many times.

Sep 09, 2024 at 03:12 PM

johnvanr
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p.1 #13 · p.1 #13 · Heat haze - anything you can do about it?

robert_in_ca wrote:
Been there one too many times.

I remember my first time... Couldn't figure out what I had done wrong. All my images sucked. A bunch of bald eagles feeding on a bird carcass out on the ice. Shot in freezing cold temperatures. Luckily, I knew some of the other photographers there and was actually relieved that we all suffered the same fate. I've learned that sometimes it's easy to recognize it and I don't even press the shutter button but other times, your eyes can trick you into thinking it's all good until your import the images.

Sep 09, 2024 at 03:21 PM

Alan Kefauver
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p.1 #14 · p.1 #14 · Heat haze - anything you can do about it?

I can occasionally improve a photo with heat haze by using the DeHaze control in LrC. I does really help with fog though.

Sep 10, 2024 at 09:05 AM

Robin Smith
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p.1 #15 · p.1 #15 · Heat haze - anything you can do about it?

Get close. Dehaze helps but will make your shot cooler, which may require you to warm it up, which then makes the dehaze less effective...

Sep 10, 2024 at 09:30 AM

cpe1991
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p.1 #16 · p.1 #16 · Heat haze - anything you can do about it?

If it's a static scene, use an ND filter and do a long time exposure or stack and average a large number of normal images, and the shimmer may average out. I've seen one posting of this many years ago where it worked. Where I come fro in the UK, heat haze is a minor problem.

Sep 10, 2024 at 10:43 AM

jedibrain
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p.1 #17 · p.1 #17 · Heat haze - anything you can do about it?

I run DXO Photolab, the Clearview tool is the analog to dehaze. It does help, but in the end the detail was not captured in the first place so can't be fully recovered.

The stacking method, sometimes referred to as 'lucky imaging' can work as well. But only for static scenes. No luck there for soccer.

Brian

Sep 10, 2024 at 12:03 PM

pulper11
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p.1 #18 · p.1 #18 · Heat haze - anything you can do about it?

I'm more curious as to how you see there is the heat haze when you're taking the photos. I had one seasoned photographer shooting right beside me during a baseball game telling me there was significant heat haze. I couldn't tell. When I got back to download the photos he was right.

What should I be looking for (in camera) either while taking the shots or during the review?

Sep 10, 2024 at 12:33 PM

rscheffler
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p.1 #19 · p.1 #19 · Heat haze - anything you can do about it?

Zoom in on your images in-camera and check the background. If it looks 'disturbed' like in the image on the right side, it's heat haze. The two images below are the same player and similar play but different game (or different time during a game - I don't recall now).

Both images actually have heat haze degradation but the one on the right is much worse, obviously.

Edited on Sep 10, 2024 at 01:02 PM · View previous versions

Sep 10, 2024 at 01:00 PM

gdanmitchell
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p.1 #20 · p.1 #20 · Heat haze - anything you can do about it?

Dehaze tools can help with general atmospheric haze from things like smoke and wildfire smoke or just plain large distances to a subject. They work to increase contrast and make some changes to color balance, etc.

But dewhaze on't help with "atmospheric interference, " sometimes called heat waves. In these cases the image will actually be distorted by the "shimmering" atmosphere and subjects become misshapen. This is particularly visible along linear elements. Here is a minor example, shot at some distance with a longish lens.

(This is small crop of a much larger image.)

The lens is actually quite sharp and in normal conditions would delineate details in the antenna towers and other linear elements quite well, but here the atmospheric distortion... distorts those things. There's really no way to get back that detail or eliminate the distortion.

You don't have a lot of options here. You can go ahead and sharpen as usual and live with the now-sharper distortions — e.g. the wiggly lines will be sharper but still wiggly. Or you could use a longer exposure and make them less obvious at the unfortunate cost of significant detail loss.

As mentioned earlier, this is not just a warm weather thing either. The example photo was made on a day with temperatures in the 60s F. I had one surprising experience years ago in mid-winter in Yosemite Valley. It was cold and there was snow on the ground, but the sun had come out. Looking at a very nearby scene (trees perhaps 50-100 feet away) I could actually see the motion from atmospheric distortion with my own eyes.

Yeah, atmosphere distortion is a bitch.

Sep 10, 2024 at 01:01 PM

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