I pass by this thicket of trees daily on my way to work. For the past year, I've thought that I should stop and take a picture. I'm not sure why. It caught my eye last winter and I saw "something" in this scene. Maybe it's that this dense patch of trees is just outside of a subdivision and it's a bit of nature not yet taken over by urban sprawl. Interesting, but I didn't make a point to stop. A year later, it was a gloomy overcast day and I passed by this place as I so often do. This time, I decided to stop. I parked my car on a side street and walked across the wide street that separates this area from a subdivision. I walked along the bordering sidewalk until I found just the right outer row of trees. I took the shot and looked at my LCD. On this dreary day, it didn't look like much. Grey, dull, boring...what was I doing here? The image sat on my drive for a few weeks until I finally decided to do something with it or delete it. It was a challenge. I initially thought I'd go black and white. No, that just didn't work. I kept what little color there was and mostly played with the contrast and detail. It's a busy image and keeping the right balance of contrast and details is tough. Too much and it hurts the eyes. Too little and it looks muddy. I tried a few things and slept on it. In the morning, I came up with something I liked. Processing info: - Raw conversion in Lightroom, including camera profile selection, lens correction, and minor exposure adjustment. - White point adjustment with Level layer in Photoshop. - General contrast adjustment with Curve layer in Photoshop. - Nik Color Efex Pro Contrast used to adjust color cast and fine contrast. - Nik Silver Efex used to adjust constrast and structure, as well as darken outer edges. The Pinhole preset was used to create a layer that was blended in Luminosity mode. - Topaz Labs Detail was used to soften the harsh details. This allowed me to keep contrast high without overemphasizing the fine textures in the scene. Please hit 'L' for large on black! Latest blog entry: X100 Sticking Aperture Disease Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Google Plus I welcome comments and I will be happy to reciprocate by checking out and commenting on your photostream. Group invites are welcome, but I do not participate in Post / Award groups. I reserve the right to delete gaudy, glittery, flashing group invite icons!
In my travels to work or other destinations for errands, I often see things that would make a neat image. Too often, I keep on driving, intent on getting to my destination and thinking I'll get back to it later. I've missed a lot of good shots that way. Time doesn't always allow me the luxury of stopping. Nor is it always practical to pull over right then and there. On this occassion, I didn't have a lot of time and there wasn't a real good place to pull over in the near vicinity. However, I happened to have my large camera backpack with my 5D and a 70-200mm. Yep, I shot this one from the car! Making sure nobody was behind me on this country road, I pulled over as much as I could without going into the ditch, dug out my camera, slapped on the lens, got the shot and drove on my way. The fire hydrant stuck out to me in this empty field. This was all farm land, but the road has been improved and a line of hydrants was recently installed. I can only assume they will be building homes or commercial properties in the near future. For now, this hydrant looks a little lonely and out of place. Shots like this are rather difficult to me. What looks like a simple scene of red, green, and blue is actually quite a challenge for my color blind eyes. I had to carefully adjust my raw capture, nervously tweaking tonality and saturation knowing that I don't see things quite like most of the folks in this world. Processing info: - Raw conversion in Lightroom, including camera profile selection, lens correction, cropping, and minor tone and saturation tweaks. - In Photoshop, contrast adjustment and a bit of "pop" added by blending in a copied layer that I treated with Topaz Labs Adjust - Photo Pop. Please hit 'L' for large on black! Latest blog entry: X100 Sticking Aperture Disease Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Google Plus I welcome comments and I will be happy to reciprocate by checking out and commenting on your photostream. Group invites are welcome, but I do not participate in Post / Award groups. I reserve the right to delete gaudy, glittery, flashing group invite icons!
Been busy lately, so I've been sharing a few iPhone snaps the past few days. I noticed this decorative prop guitar at a bar in Hutto, TX. Taken with my iPhone and tweaked just a bit in Lightroom. Please hit 'L' for large on black! Latest blog entry: X100 Sticking Aperture Disease Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Google Plus I welcome comments and I will be happy to reciprocate by checking out and commenting on your photostream. Group invites are welcome, but I do not participate in Post / Award groups. I reserve the right to delete gaudy, glittery, flashing group invite icons!
