What I Am Working On: Seemingly Small Adjustments

Sometimes it is little things that can make a big difference. The original file:

ISO 250 f/11 22mm 1/640 sec

The edit:

ISO 250 f/11 22mm 1/640 sec

Custom white balance and lens distortion, these are two adjustments that I started with that made a big difference.

Seemingly unimportant details like the trees in the foreground are helping to tell an important story about this scene, like how far up you have to hike to see this view. I wrote about that a bit in a previous post and showed a different part of the landscape. In this case, I think a photo of this scene without the trees would be telling a completely different story. Your comments and thoughts are welcome below.

Added to Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge, Summer Scenes and Tuesday Photo Challenge, Trees.

Cheers!

What I Am Working On: Working With Color

When it comes to working with color within an image, there are a lot of ways you can approach it. This week I was editing this image, shot at Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin:

ISO 400 f/2.2 1/17sec 4.2mm

Shot with my iPhone, this is an image I like a lot and think that there would be many potential editing possibilities. For this particular editing session, my interest was in the red tones in the image, which have a warm almost salmon tone to them. Here is my edit:

ISO 400 f/2.2 1/17sec 4.2mm

To get this look, I dropped all the saturation sliders except for red, that I left at 0. Then I moved the red luminance slider to 60. It’s a matter of personal preference, but I often find I prefer working with luminance rather than saturation when giving a particular color a boost. This edit has been cropped slightly to straighten it. I’ve increased the small details slightly, in place of sharpening, and added a “soft glow” filter set to 18.

So, that is what I am calling my red edit. What do you think of the result? feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!

Added to Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge, Red and Cee’s Black & White Challenge, Starting with the Letters K or L.

What I Am Working On: Old Files

From time to time I go through photographs that I shot several years ago to see if I would like to try a new interpretation of them. That’s how I came to be working on this file:

ISO 250 f/2.7 1/60sec 4.3mm

This photo was taken at St. Michael’s Church in Betws-y-Coed, Wales, in 2016. So, some things haven’t changed since then, like the fact that I enjoy visiting churches and graveyards. This photo was taken with my point and shoot that only has jpeg file capability.  That means there is a limit to how much detail I am going to get out of the sky. To work around that one of the filters that I used was “dark fog”. I paired it with a filter called “Old Timer” that I have in a collection of Halloween “looks”. I felt that a Halloween filter was appropriate with it being October and the photo being an old graveyard. My final edit was something much darker than the original:

ISO 250 f/2.7 1/60sec 4.3mm

Do you like the edit? That tree was really something else! and I feel like it adds a lot of character to the photo. Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!

Added to Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge, Circles, Curves, and Arches.

Walls of the Missing

I am planning to visit the Cambridge American Cemetery again soon and as part of that, I was looking through some photo files that I shot this past winter. One of the features in the cemetery is its Walls of the Missing that have 5,127 names on it. It’s an interesting structure in that there are places where you can walk through and it operates as both a barrier to the outside, but also an entrance and exit between the cemetery and it’s exterior. So it’s both a wall and a door. It’s imposing, yet delicate; Both personal and impersonal. During this particular photo editing session, I was working with images that included the Wall:

Hipstamatic, shot with iPhone

Hipstamatic, shot with iPhone.

Hipstamatic, shot with iPhone

These first images are ones that I shot on my iPhone using the app Hipstamatic. One of the features of that app is “randomize” which means you shake your phone, take your photo, and the app applies a random selection of filters. I created a series of those over the course of my visit.

I also brought my Canon 80D:

ISO 400 24mm f/11 1/250sec

 

ISO 400 24mm f/11 1/640

These two photos I edited in Luminar 3 with an eye to accentuating the warm but quickly fading light of a February afternoon.

It was an interesting work session, and I was giving some thought to how different the lighting conditions will be since my next visit will be in July. In that vein, I think it is nice as a photographer to have the experience of shooting the same place at different times of the year. It’s a good exercise in thinking through things like light. It’s also interesting to then have the time of year be part of the narrative of the image.

Do you have a place like this, that you visit regularly over the year in part just to see the changes? What do you think of my various photos, is there a particular one that speaks to you? Feel free to comment below.

Cheers!

Added to Tuesday Photo Challenge, Wall and Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge, 5+ Items.

 

It’s a Folly

Sometimes things are complicated:

ISO 500 18mm f/11 1/320sec

This is Rushton Triangular Lodge. The fact that it’s a folly is the simplest part of the story. A folly is generally speaking an outbuilding on the property of a large estate. Generally defined as a costly ornamental building with no practical purpose. The first one I ever saw in person was actually built as a fake ruin. I read about the one pictured above and really just wanted to go see it in person like maybe it would make more sense that way.

This lodge was built in 1593, by Sir Thomas Tresham, who interpreted three knocks he heard as God telling him to build a structure to honor the Trinity. I’ll admit that part sounded a bit nuts to me. But then, looking into it a bit more, I read that he had spent 15 years imprisoned for his Catholic faith. So then, I look at this more as something he took seriously, he was Catholic and wanted a way to express that at a time when that wasn’t really allowed. He died in 1605. In that same year, his son Francis was involved and convicted of having a roll in the Gunpowder Plot. Francis, convicted of treason, would die before his execution date, he was beheaded after death and his head was publicly displayed.

The folly itself is a virtual riot of the number 3 and Catholic theology. It’s fascinating to look at from the outside, but plain and dark inside. So interesting, but I’m still not really sure about what to think about it. I’ll chalk this one up to something I still need to think about, I was glad to get to see it in person though. Have you ever felt that way, like if you go to visit a site it will then make more sense to you? Have you ever considered building an expensive building with no practical purpose? Feel free to comment below.

Cheers!

Added to Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge, Letters or Numbers.

And the Number of the Cameras Shall be Three

Do any looking online about photography and you are going to run into all kinds of information about the kind of gear you have to have. Welcome to my version of that. It goes something like this, what do you have? what are you willing to haul along? good, great, let’s go! Today it’s to the Church of Panaghia Kapnikarea, said to be the oldest Greek Orthodox Church in Athens:

ISO 800 10mm f/22 1/80sec

That’s the photo I took using my Canon 50D.

ISO 200 4.3mm f/2.7 1/125 sec

That’s the photo I took using my Canon PowerShot.

ISO 25 4.2mm f/22 1/337 sec

That’s the photo I took using my iPhone.

That’s right, I was willing to haul three cameras around Athens, and you bet I used all three. The Canon 50D I took with a wide-angle lens. It’s good at getting a full building shot in a city. That particular shot was taken in the RAW format which meant plenty of data for later editing. For that edit, I went with a warm vintage look in homage to the color of the stones and the age of the building.

The second photo was taken with my Canon PowerShot which is a point and shoot camera that does not have RAW capability. What it does do nicely is handle color well, even in low light situations, so I often use it when I am capturing the detail of something. In this case, it’s the radiance of that mosaic.

The third shot was taken using my iPhone. Often when I am in a new place and taking photos, I  get a shot using my iPhone because I keep GPS data on and I use these types of photos later to confirm the exact location of where I was which helps with things like figuring out how to spell the name of this church.

Have you spotted the no photography sign on the church door? While I find that disappointing, I’m ok with that, so I stowed all three cameras and went inside to take a look. Sometimes just having the memory of an experience is sufficient, regardless of how many cameras you are carrying.

How do you decide what gear to haul? do you have a go-to set up for shooting in the city? Feel free to leave a comment about that or the edits I chose in the comment section below.

Cheers!

Added to Tuesday Photo Challenge, Radiant and Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge, Three.

What I Am Working On: Vintage Photo Look, Again

This post is a follow-on to this post I wrote last week about creating your own vintage photo look. As I wrote in that post, this is the video I followed as a starting point. I’m going to talk a bit more about that particular look I created and then show a second one. So that you can see the differences in the two looks, I will show them both on the same photo. I’ll also be including screenshots of what my settings look like for the edits. The file I am using is this one:

ISO 800 22mm f/22 1/160sec

This is a Byzantine-era church that sits in the shadow of the Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Athens. Both churches are beautiful, but for different reasons. The first vintage style look I created looks like this when applied:

ISO 800 22mm f/22 1/160sec

And here is a screenshot of the edits:

 

The second look when applied is this one:

ISO 800 22mm f/22 1/160sec

And here are the settings for it:

I hope that you found the screenshots of the settings useful and the fact that the edits are done on the same file to be helpful as a point of comparison. Do you prefer one of the looks over the other? I welcome your feedback and thoughts in the comment section below. I have saved both of these settings for application in other files I’ll be working with.

Cheers!

Added to Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge, Two.

What I Am Working On: Creative Use of A Vignette

When it comes to learning how to use photo-editing software, I think YouTube can be a good source of information. There is a lot out there, plenty of videos to look through, in my opinion, that’s both the strength and weakness of YouTube. This video is an example of that, there are some tips that I will use and others that I will not. For the purpose of this blog post, I am writing about using the vignette filter as a way to isolate an object in a photo. The particular tip I am referencing is at about the ten-minute mark of the video.  I decided to experiment using this photo:

ISO 400 18mm f/11 1/50sec

This grave marker is pretty visually interesting so I would like it to stand out a bit more. The tip in the video demonstrates putting a rather pronounced vignette on your photo, then erasing the vignette on the area you would like to highlight.  My final version is this:

ISO 400 18mm f/11 1/50sec

I’m both satisfied with this and not. First, it is an easy edit, and sometimes simple techniques can be pretty powerful, so I like the underlying theory. It seems to me that this would be a more impactful editing method for subjects that are more offset than this one, so if I were to edit this file again using the technique, I would re-think the crop first and then work from there. Overall though, I have saved this video and written this post because I see this a technique that I would use.

What do you think? Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!

Added to Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge, One.

 

What I Am Working On: What to Leave In, What to Take Out

When it comes to editing, there is always a bit of deciding what to leave in and what to take out. Here is a file I was working on last week:

ISO 800 11mm F/13 1/500sec

In my edit, I decided to take out the people. In this case, the eraser tool was sufficient for this:

ISO 800 11mm F/13 1/500sec

I’ve cropped the image, but just slightly. I wanted to leave in the shadow of the tree. The tree itself I wanted to leave in the center of the frame, despite this being against the “rules” of photography. I wanted to leave in the feel of a sunny day, but I did decide to add a vintage film filter to this file.

All the edits here are pretty basic, but they do change the image. What do you think of these changes? feel free to comment below.

Cheers!

Picfair version is here.

Add to Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge, Shadow.

Wordless Wednesday: Daffodil

View this post on Instagram

#Morning after the #rain #nofilter #daffodils

A post shared by Amy Maranto (@marantophotography) on Feb 6, 2019 at 2:41am PST

Cheers!

Added to Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge, Orange and Pink.

and Cee’s Flower of the Day.