I have never really had great success with night photography. Often my images are comprised excessively of bright lights and blown out detail. Nothing I was really ready to write home about. It was on a lark I thought about capturing a series of images to create an HDR image and see where that would take me.
A long weekend in New York City and first stop is the Observation Deck at Rockefeller Center. I indulge my affinity for panoramas as a afterthought, I took a set of four images to photo merge a set laterally rather than the usual side too side.
This one had been picking at me for a while, and only recently have I found the direction I wanted for this to turnout. Taken with a Nikon D7000 and edited in Lightroom CC.
Panorama of Midtown Manhattan taken from the observation deck of 30 Rockefeller Center. Continue reading Nikon D850 on Manhattan Island, NYC
I have covered Alien Skin and its offering of Exposure 7 in an earlier post, but when I found the need for an additional license, I purchased Alien Skin’s bundle of Exposure X2, Snap Art 4 and Alien Skin Blow Up 3. Total cost was $138, more or less. Continue reading Photoshop CC Plugin: Alien Skin Exposure X2
While researching for a blog post on mobile photography and editing software, I came across this image from a few years back. My phone is clogged with images from scouting sites for my Nikon, and this little one was captured on a day trip long ago. I dumped it on my Mac, and in Lightroom I shifted the perspective down a bit. In Photoshop, I played around in Alien Skin’s Exposure 7. I used a preset for vintage film where colors were subdued and grain was added. A light vignette and it’s good enough for paper.
Have a great day.
2016 was a bit of a tempest for my family and many things had to be pushed to the back burner. Only recently have I been able to return to my various hobbies and writing. This proved to be more of a trial, made evident when I happened to hit the wrong button and deleted many of the images from this site. This turned out to be fortuitous as I had to go through various backup drives and SD chips, searching for images to restore my site and, in the process, found many other images waiting to be edited and posted. Continue reading The Thames River: Photography at Night.
White balance is hard to explain to someone. It is even worse to explain when something goes wrong and it has to be fixed in post processing. I guess the most simple way of putting it is: you have to let your camera know what white is in an image. Once your system knows what white is, the other colors fall into place.
Continue reading White Balance in Lightroom and Photoshop CC
Adobe RGB or sRGB? Which to choose…
Some time ago, I was looking at the settings for my Nikon and took note of the two options I was offered in the color space menu. Checking the camera manual, there was really no information about the benefits of one or the other, so I went on a hunt for information about “color space” in general and these two settings specifically. I am all about trying to get the best image for my dollar and the cameras’ manual was very non-judgmental about these two options. So it was up to me.
I got the camera thing going on early in my life. My first camera was a Kodak Pocket Instamatic 110 for my birthday in 1973. I have no photos from that time, but later on I saved enough to purchase a Sears Brand Pentax SLR. I set up my own darkroom and developed my own film, favoring Ilford HP 5 over Kodak’s offerings.
Continue reading Black and White Photography in the 70’s and 80’s
I’m starting to warm up to Lightroom CC for two simple reasons. One is that, as a bundle with Photoshop CC, it’s only ten dollars a month for both of them… My emphasis. The second was Lightroom CC’s ability to edit gradient shading.
There was a few features that attracted me to Lightroom CC/6. The initial being the ability to edit gradient shading which takes a bit of work to get right in my older version of Lightroom. Panoramas and HDR are all nice and fine, but I can do that in Photoshop CS6 thank you very much; the gradient editing was the kicker. Continue reading De-Hazing a Photograph in Lightroom CC…
Update: If you haven’t noticed, this article was written 3 years ago and a lot has changed. Lightroom CC has come far in that time and is a excellent method of editing images, process RAW files and manage your image folders.
Adobe is also moving in the direction of mobile photograph coupling Lightroom with Adobe’s collection of mobile editing app’s. If you are on the Creative Cloud subscription, you have access to your mobile files as part of free cloud storage. Additionally, Lightroom as I know it, has a additional version closely mirroring the mobile version.
Last April, Adobe released the latest version of Lightroom. Dubbed Lightroom CC for the subscription version or Lightroom 6 for the one you picked up at the local software outlet. I gave it a few months and then took the plunge by purchasing the disk version, sometimes referred to as the perpetual license version by users. I understand why Adobe pushes it’s subscription plan; Adobe Photoshop was the most pirated software out there and it was also top of the food chain in prices too. When I jumped to CS6 after years of using Photoshop 5, it cost me in the neighborhood of $650, which is no small chunk of change for me personally.
Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris France.
There are a thousand reasons why a picture doesn’t come out right: bad weather, poor lighting, light temperature at the wrong setting. Camera settings can be a major culprit when dealing with even a modest prosumer camera.
Please note: I hope this post to be informative and I use several screen captures and the resolution of the images has been left at a relatively high dpi. I hope this will add to the post, but may require a bit of patience when loading the galleries.
Took the subway from Hiro-o to Ginza. Switched over to the train to Tokyo Station. Walked over to the Imperial Palace….
It’s closed on Mondays.
We rented an apartment in a castle in South West England. Thornbury Castle has been around since the 11th century in one form or another. After a pleasant night in one of the nicest bedrooms in the Western World, we explored the surrounding ruins of the castle. This scene here appears to be from one of the gate houses that serviced the western entrance of the grounds. It needed more than a little bit of cleaning up, but it serves as a great image Continue reading Southern England
This was photographed at the Louvre in Paris as part of the Egyptian Art exhibit, of which there is an overwhelming amount to see. I was fortunate in how the initial lighting came out, and in Photoshop I was able to take it to the next level. Continue reading Egypt
Seeing Stonehenge is an impossible experience. I had visited the United Kingdom in 1973, taking pictures with a Kodak 110 pocket camera. Those pictures are lost to me now, but on my last trip to London, My wife and I made a point of going to Salisbury. We left early in the morning to avoid traffic and made it to the site at about 8 am local, only to find it was closed until 9 am…. it’s in the middle of the Salisbury plain, out in the open… how can it be closed? I thought this, but didn’t utter the words; I worry about becoming the ugly American when traveling abroad. Continue reading Stonehenge, Salisbury England
I as much stumbled across this scene as anything I had ever taken.
We were walking down Whitehall, heading for a recommended pub where a good lunch was to be had at a reasonable price, when I spotted a pair of the Queen’s House Cavalry manning their post in front of their barracks. They were already demonstrating their spot on discipline, with tourists jockeying for position for selfies with the horses and I didn’t want to be just another idiot showing something bordering on disrespect. Continue reading London, England
The Digital Lens 