Travel Theme: Height

When I saw that height was the theme this week at Where’s My Backpack?  I went back to my photos from this summer in St. Paul Minnesota.  As part of our tour of the capitol building we went out on the roof.  I got some fun shots, one of which I have already posted.  From another angle, you can also see the Cathedral of St. Paul:

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I have included the link to the Cathedral because after we were finished hanging out on the roof of the Capitol, we went and took a very interesting tour of the Cathedral.

Because I am studying for my Photoshop midterm exam this week, you should guess that that photo above has been edited.  I will show you the original exposure in a moment and you will see how hazy the light was that day.  In terms of editing, first I created two additional levels layers for this photo.  One I adjusted for the sky to make it more dynamic.  The second I adjusted for the Cathedral, to lighten it.  Once I was happy with that, I put a film filter on the photo.  I used DXO FilmPack 3 for that.  For this photo I picked Kodak elite extra color 100 setting, because I really liked the color boost.  Then I did some final sharpening in Photoshop.

I wrote about DXO FilmPack 3 last week because it is being offered free until October 31st.  I am including the link again in case you missed it.  I’m really enjoying it and maybe you would too.

Here is my original photo:

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What do you think?  Do you like my edited version?  Feel free to leave a comment below.  If you don’t want to talk about my editing, feel free to leave me good luck and encouragement on my exam, I’d appreciate it!

Cheers!

Travel Theme: Big

I visited the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden over the summer and like everyone else took a picture of the sculpture Spoonbridge and Cherry:

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Given the size of the sculpture, there are many different ways you could shoot it.  When I was shooting, there were a lot of people milling around so that was a factor in the angle I decided to go with.

The other challenge in taking this picture was that it was bright and slightly hazy, which meant that the exposures I was getting were a bit flat.  Given that I had such a high shutter speed to cut down on some of the light, I was pretty confident that I could bracket the exposure and make an HDR image later.  The resulting image is what you see above.  I’ll put the original middle exposure photo below.  You will see that the two are not drastically different.  While HDR is also great for creative images, I think it also works well for standard shots such as this one.  To my way of thinking, it is a clarification of the original shot. The HDR editing software I prefer is Photomatix.  In this case I combined my images and then cropped and sharpened it is Photoshop.

Here is the original image:

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What do you think? Would you have even bothered with the photo editing process on a photo like this?

This post was written in response to the travel theme big over at Where’s My Backpack?

Cheers!

A Window in the Ceiling

I know you would usually call a window in the ceiling a skylight, but it really just seemed like a window to me:

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This was a difficult shot for me to get and the first constraint was time.  I was on a tour of the Minnesota State Capitol, so I only had a few minutes and I hadn’t really expected to stumble across this window either.  You may be wondering why I used such a high shutter speed.  I had been thinking of creating an HDR image, but as it turned out, I did not get a set of exposures that were perfect, so I decided against using HDR.   Also, in order for this to be a successful HRD image, the lines in the glass would have to be perfectly lined up in the exposures and they just weren’t; I would have needed a tripod to get the shot I needed for HDR editing.

When I was taking the shot, composition was a challenge.  I couldn’t fit the whole window in so I had to go for just part of it.  You will see the original shot  and note that I cropped it when I edited it and I also straightened it.  All my editing I did in Photoshop.  I converted the original color image to black and white using a blue filter setting.  My last step in editing was to sharpen it.

Here is the original:

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Despite the fact that this color version really only has a hint of color, it really does have a different feel than the black and white version, don’t you think?

This post was written for the weekly black and white photography challenge at Sonel’s Corner.  This week’s theme is windows and doors.

Cheers!

Travel Theme: Architecture

If you are ever in St. Paul Minnesota, stop by the state capitol and take the tour. Don’t forget your camera because, weather permitting, the tour goes out on the roof:

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The view of St. Paul is wonderful and you can take a photo of this gold leaf statue that is on the roof of the building.

When I was on the roof, I was pretty sure that I was going to want to do an HDR version of this image.  So, I bracketed my exposures.  So the image above is a combination of three images, set to (-1, 0, 1)  I did this because it was an overcast but bright day, so I was pretty sure that just a single image would be pretty washed out.  I’ll put the original image in at the bottom of the post so that you will see what I mean.  I used Photomatix to create the HDR, but what I really wanted was an image that looked like what you would actually see, so I stayed away from the color manipulation that is possible in photo editing.  I then sharpened the image in Photoshop and cropped it just a bit.  Here is the original image:

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In this case, I think the HDR gave the image the subtle boost I was looking for.  What do you think?

This post was written in response to the weekly travel theme challenge at Where’s my backpack?; architecture is the topic for this week.

Cheers!