Even At A Distance

It was almost two years ago that I took this photo:

ISO 200 f/16 1/250sec 21mm

Taken on a drive along the Normandy Coast, this landscape still resides in my mind as one of the more beautiful places I have ever been. I pulled out this file yesterday and this morning created an interpretation of it:

ISO 200 f/16 1/250sec 21mm

I started with some basic edits that included straightening it a bit while I was cropping. I removed some dust spots with a combination of the erase and clone and stamp tools. I added the Luminar Look, Soft and Dreamy Faded. Within that look, which is applied at 100%, I made some adjustments to the filters. On a separate layer I then applied the Orton Effect filter and a vignette.

Your thoughts or questions about the edit are welcome below.

Cheers!

Added to the Lens-Artists Challenge, Distance.

Made with Luminar: A River Runs Through It

This photo, taken from the grounds of Chateau Gaillard, shows the Seine River in the French countryside. It was taken with my iPhone:

ISO 25 f/2.2 1/538sec 4.2mm

A beautiful spot on a beautiful day. I kept the edits on this photo pretty basic:

ISO 25 f/2.2 1/538sec 4.2mm

I did a small crop and other basics with whites and blacks and the detail enhancer slider. I’ve then added the Luminar Look, Sleepy Forest and set that to 58%. Your thoughts on the edit are welcome below and this post has been added to the Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, A River Runs Through It.

The Made with Luminar Series

This image is part of a project I am calling Made with Luminar. What the images in this series have in common is the software used to edit them, Luminar 3. As with my usual blog posts particulars of the camera settings can be found in the caption below the image. I’ll then explain what other filters and edits have been applied, often mentioning what layer and therefore order that they were applied. The text of these posts includes any Luminar “Looks” that have been applied to the photo. Each look is a series of presets that are applied to the photo. Where applicable I will mention what changes I have made to any of the looks. A full explanation of looks is available here on their website, https://skylum.com/luminar/user-guides/chapter-14-working-with-luminar-looks

You can assume basic edits have been applied. My most common edits are cropping, detail enhancement, and vignette. Specific questions or thoughts on the image are welcome in the comment section below.

January Squares: Late Afternoon Light

I was just in Strasbourg France for a few hours. Long enough to get this photo though:

ISO 25 f/2.2 4.2mm 1/1083 sec

Also, long enough to convince me that a trip back would be a good thing. For the photo above, I wanted to accentuate the glow of the summer afternoon:

ISO 25 f/2.2 4.2mm 1/1083 sec

So after cropping and straightening the photo, I added the Luminar look, Daydream, and set it at 79%.

The Instagram version is here:

View this post on Instagram

Daydream in late afternoon light. #summer #januarylight #sundayvibes #church #france

A post shared by Amy Maranto (@marantophotography) on Jan 26, 2020 at 12:22am PST

Added to Day 26 of January Light.

Cheers!

Wordless Wednesday, Utah Beach

ISO 400 13mm f/16 1/800sec

Picfair version here.

Cheers!

 

Wordless Wednesday: Cemetery of the Four Nations, Caen, France

ISO 2000 21mm f/16 1/20sec

Picfair version here.

Cheers!

What I Am Working On: I Wonder what that Button Does?

Sometimes a little bit of curiosity can be a good thing. When it comes to photo editing this translates into: just push that button or slide that slider and see what happens. It’s usually pretty easy to back up if you end up with a result that you don’t like. All you need is curiosity and a little bit of time. This image below was taken at Pointe du Hoc.

ISO 400 22mm f/16 1/100sec

My first edit was this one:

ISO 400 22mm f/16 1/100sec

It features a lot of the edits you would expect from me. I’m hoping you think this edit pops a bit and is a bit more clear. I’m hoping that you don’t think that it varies too much from the original. With this type of edit, I’m looking to represent the scene as it was.

As per my recent blog post, I saved a version of it. Then I continued to edit. I was looking to create something a bit different:

ISO 400 22mm f/16 1/100sec

When I am in this more creative mode, my layer panel starts to look like this:

Layers Panel screenshot

If you have no interest in using layers or already know all about them, feel free to skip the rest of this post, leave a comment or like below if you that appeals to you. The rest of this post is a bit about layers and how to use them.

In the screenshot, the original file and then the layer above it is what led to the natural version of the photo. The layer marked, “silver lining” and the two above that are part of the more creative version. I’d like to mention a few things that I think are important to consider when making a creative edit. The first is that I think it is really helpful to have additional edits on separate layers. This makes it easy to see what you have done and remove or further work on any particular edit. Making a new layer is easy and pretty universal in photo editing applications. In this particular case, I clicked on the “+” to the right of “Layers” and a drop-down option was “add adjustment layer”. Let’s say on Adjustment Layer 1 I wanted to adjust the exposure.  I do that and then add Adjustment Layer 2 and edit for clarity on that layer.  I could then click on the eyeball from Adjustment Layer 1 and that would turn off the exposure adjustment if I wanted to see what the photo would look like with just the clarity adjustment. That gives me the flexibility of having several edits that can easily be adjusted or even deleted independently of one another. Also, It is possible to rename layers, for example, the layer that is called silver lining, that is the name of the filter I put on that layer. In this case that not only makes it easier to know what adjustment is there but also functions as a reminder to myself as to what filter I have used. Changing the name of a layer is done by clicking over the text, and changing the text when the text box appears.

Your thoughts on my edits and the use of layers are all welcome below.

Cheers!

Added to Tuesday Photo Challenge, Wonder.

Picfair version here.

Ruins of St. Gilles

This photo was taken in Caen, France:

ISO 200 14mm f/16 1/200sec

We had spent the day looking at many of the sites in the city, Caen has a lot to look at, and it was a beautiful day to be out and about. The photo above is the ruins of St. Gilles. Here is my edit of this photo:

ISO 200 14mm f/16 1/200sec

I used a wide angle lens to take the original photo. I did start with a crop for my edit because there were a few buildings on the right side of the frame that I found distracting. I also took out the piece of red trash. My other edits were just boosts, a bit of tinkering for things like the white balance and detail enhancer. I find that in Luminar 3, I am using the details enhancer slider in place of the clarity slider. Why? the details are broken into three sliders, small, medium, and large details, I find this allows for a bit more nuance in the sharpening of the image.

Small edits, but I do like the result. What do you think? feel free to comment below.

I often have conversations through this blog about workflow, including management of files. The photo in this post is on my “slow but steady” track. I keep all my files in folders that are arranged chronologically by date. The folder will also have the name of the place where the photos were taken, in this case, Caen. When it comes time for that folder to be edited it is often months later. In this case, the photo was taken last May. It’s at this stage of editing that a lot of files end up in the trash bin.  It’s also at this point where I often refer to the photos I have taken of the scene on my phone as they have the GPS location data and I find that helpful for things like pulling up the name of this church. I fall into the camp of people who frequently move photo files off of my phone and on to my hard drive, so those iPhone files were in the same folder, that just makes things easier in my opinion.

Cheers!

Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, Architecture.

Wordless Wednesday: Memory of Caen

ISO 25 4.2mm f/2.2 1/100sec

Altering the Landscape

Usually, when I think of landscape photography I think of sweeping vistas devoid of people or man-made elements. But not always, so when I saw there was a photography challenge up this week where “landscape” was the theme, I thought I would consider something that had an obvious human footprint.  At the moment, I am working on processing photos that I took in Normandy, France. I have a lot of beautiful coastline shots. Normandy is a beautiful area, but obviously, it’s history includes that of WWII. I will be posting a photo in a few days of the coastline of Dieppe, in Normandy, but first I edited these photos from the Dieppe Canadian War Cemetery:

ISO 200 10mm f/16 1/125

This first shot is shot at the widest angle, to show as much of the landscape as possible. It’s been edited to give the colors a bit of a boost and a bit of clarity. This second shot is edited in much the same way:

ISO 200 12mm f/16 1/160sec

To take this shot, I brought the stones into more detail by both taking a step closer and by bringing my lens from 10mm, which would have shown more of the scene, to 12mm, which shows less.

With these two shots, I was hoping to convey the reality of what this cemetery looks like. Most of the soldiers buried here are Canadian, the rest are British. The soldiers laid to rest here were killed in the Dieppe Raid of 1942. It was a disaster for the Allied Forces and while not all of their casualties were left behind, a lot were. It is interesting to me that this cemetery was created by the Germans, see the back to back stones of the first rows? that is typical of a German style of burial. Perhaps more interesting is that when the war was over, this cemetery remained here.

What I’d like you to know if you’re Canadian or British and have a family member or countrymen interred here and you aren’t able to visit, the Germans picked a beautiful spot to bury your loved one. I hope that my two pictures convey a sense of the beauty of the landscape here.

Which brings me to my third photo:

ISO 200 10mm f/16 1/160sec

This last edit is where I am trying to process what would have been the terror of the raid with the beauty of the land itself. To shoot this idea, I decided to shoot from behind the stones and into the sun. The filter I applied to this had a red tinge to it. The red for the heat of battle, blood itself, confusion, anger and hatred, and the red prominently in the Canadian flag. It’s a lot to try and sum up in one image.

Cemeteries are wonderfully complex places to me. I hope that I have conveyed some of that in these images. What do you think of my edits? Your comments are welcome below.

Cheers!

Added to Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, Landscapes.

Picfair shot 1.

Picfair shot 2.

Picfair shot 3.

Wordless Wednesday: In the Distance

ISO 640 90mm f/16 1/250sec

 

ISO 640 90mm f/16 1/250sec

Normandy American Cemetery

Cheers!

Added to Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge, In the Distance.