Weekly Photo Challenge: Liquid

Water features are an important part of the gardens at the Alhambra. Ironically, as I was trying to get a shot of this pool, I was also attempting to protect my camera from the off and on rain:

ISO1600 18mm f/13 1/1000sec

It was a beautiful scene, and as I was shooting it, I was thinking about the liquid reflections in the pool, that is what really caught my attention. I shot this scene as a bracketed exposure, thinking to create an HDR version.  I did that but wasn’t crazy about the outcome of the sky. So, I went back to my original files.  The exposure above was the one that appealed the most, so I started there and created this version:

ISO1600 18mm f/13 1/1000sec

This version has been created in Lightroom. I started with the sky. I have used a graduated filter. In this case, I dragged the filter from the top of the photo to just below the lowest part of the sky. From there I used the slider that allowed me to drop the temperature of the photo, which brought out the blue tone. I also used the slider that removed some of the noise in that part of the photo.

Other overall adjustments I have made include, adjusting the tone curve a slight amount and increasing the luminance of the red, orange, yellow, and green tones. I also sharpened the image a bit but then also moved the dehaze slider into negative territory. This is a bit contradictory, but I wanted the image to be both sharp and smooth at the same time.

What do you think of my final edit? Do you like it overall? are there elements that appeal to you or not? Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!

Travel Theme: Liquid

This week’s theme over at Where’s my backpack? gave me the excuse to go back to a photo a took a few months ago.  If you take photos you have probably had this happen to you, you see a great subject but the light is awful.  Sometimes with photos like that, I edit them later into HDR images which is what I did with this photo:

HDR using Photomatix

This is a view of the St. Louis Art Museum that I thought would be interesting.  I took several shots of the fountains that day because they are quite nice.  When you see the original below, I think you will be surprised at what I managed to salvage:

ISO 200 28mm -1.67eb f/22 1/200

In order to make the HDR image I first created two additional copies of the original photo.  In Aperture I changed the exposure balance of the copies, one to a 0 ev, the other to +1.  Then I combined the three images in Photomatix.  The resulting photo I liked best was one of the “painterly” versions.

Cheers!