What’s Your Play #40
What’s Your Play is hosted by Laura at Dolce Pics. She provides a SOOC (straight out of camera) shot and the folks post-process it and share the results. More info here.
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Here’s my entry for What’s Your Play #40 -Water Wheel
Software: Lightroom 2
What I did and why:
I didn’t do too much editing on this aside from enhancing the colors.
- Deepened the shadows and brightened the high lights by tweaking the curves just slightly
- I loved the sky peeking through the trees so I boosted the blue just a bit
- I thought the ground was a little too yellow so I toned down the yellow to more of a brownish tone to enhance to earth
- Sharpened the image to bring out the detail in the rocks and trees
- Vignette to finish off
I didn’t crop this photo. The obvious crop would be to focus on the wheel. I thought about it but decided that I’d lose more than I would gain, especially because I loved the litle bit of sky but didn’t want to sacrifice the ground to do so. I like the scene as a whole very much, especially the frozen pond. So I figured that I’d enhance the feeling of the cold, crisp scene of a water wheel in winter than just a water wheel alone.
What’s Your Play #39 – Rings
What’s Your Play is hosted by Laura at Dolce Pics. She provides a SOOC (straight out of camera) shot and the folks post-process it and share the results. More info here.
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Here’s my entry for What’s Your Play #39 – Rings
Software: Lightroom 2 — one of the first times I’ve used LR and I’ve fallen head over heels in love with it. So powerful! So shiny! So… expensive. Ow.
What I did and why:
- I tweaked the color a bit, boosting the saturation and vibrancy in particular as well as the white balance. I had tried using an LR preset that I just didn’t find myself very happy with. Playing with the sliders and working with curves was more familiar and gave me a better result than the presets.
- I started playing around with the sharpening slider and was amazed at the difference it made in the detail on the rings. Wow!
- I tried a number of different crops but decided I liked this 5×7 one the best.
- After all was said and done, I added a slight vignette to finish it off.
Whee!
Photo Friday – Lessons Learned
My sister is my daughter’s godmother (ninang in Tagalog.) We didn’t get any really good photos from The Little Empress’ baptism and we got none of all of TLE and her Ninang. To make up for this, my sister and I took TLE to a local park to take some photos.
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p style=”text-align: left;”>Focal length – 50mm Apeture – F/1.8 Shutter – 1/164 ISO – 100 Equipment: Canon Digital Rebel XTi Post Processing: Color correction, cropping in Photoshop Elements
This was the first time I shot outdoors. Once we got there, I realized that I was going to have a bit of problem with my white balance. I didn’t know how to compensate for the fact that TLE’s and my sister’s outfits contrasted so much. If I metered off of TLE, my sister was too dark; if I metered off of my sister, TLE appeared blown out. Also not helping was the fact that the sun was MUCH harsher than I had anticipated even though it was pretty late in the day.
Most of my white balance problems probably could have been prevented by bringing either a gray card or just a plain sheet of white paper for my sister to hold up so that I could have used that to set the white balance while I was shooting. DUH. Lesson learned on that one.
Despite some lighting missteps, I’m pretty happy with how this shot came out. TLE is still a bit blown out but I think the image works fine.
RAW Christmas memories
Despite having had my dSLR for over 2 years, it has taken me until now to even begin experimenting with shooting in RAW. I knew the magic of shooting in RAW really lies in the post-processing power but I didn’t really appreciate it until I actually got a trial copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements and saw what you could do with RAW. Here is a really good example of what you can save by shooting in RAW
The straight out of camera (SOOC) shot was completely underexposed — my flash was running out of battery and hadn’t recharged when I took this shot. A quick adjustment of the white balance in PSE while opening the original RAW .CR2 file completely saved this photo (as well as some other photos that suffered the same flash malfunction.) I will never go back to shooting in JPG ever again!
Fun Fake Polaroids
When I was about 10, I told my mom that I wanted to be a photographer and wanted a camera. What I really wanted was another version of my dad’s Minolta SLR — what I got was a hot pink and grey Polaroid camera and a book on beginner photography. Odd start though it was, my love for photography followed me into my adult years though the Polaroid was lost to time.
Still, I have a soft spot for Polaroids. There’s something about the variated colors and tones of a Polaroid — hardly ever true to life but still kind of neat to look at. But I’m not so fond as to go hunting down a vintage one — oh dear god, I just realized that my first camera would be considered vintage now. ARGH! — and certainly not enough to shell out the money it would cost to buy the no longer in production film which has become a bit of a commodity in the niche photography world. I’m far too cheap to shell out money for the sake of nostalgia when a perfectly good, off-color Polaroid-esque photo can be manipulated on my computer.
There are various Photoshop actions and techniques you could apply to make a fake Polaroid but you’re missing the best part of the Polaroid experience — waiting and shaking that sucker to make it develop faster. (And I pause now to realize that there are kids out there who will never know the fun of waiting for a Polaroid because they have digital cameras. SPOILED THEY ARE. And channeling Yoda I am.)
But fear not, if you’ve got a Mac, you’ve got a better option — Poladroid! This is an awesome application where you literally drag and drop your digital photo to be made into a Poladroid onto the application. Seconds later in spits out… a brown Polaroid. But wait! Your “film” is developing. Neat! You can even drag and “shake” the Poladroid to speed up the process. In a few minutes (yes, minutes) you have a neat, slightly oddly exposed, perfectly (maybe) fake!Polaroid version of your original photo.
Here’s one of The Little Empress…
Before
Poladroided
Spiffy, eh? I’ve found that the Poladroid works best if you start off with a square photo. I just cropped mine in iPhoto. This is an awesome way to make photos that may not have been that great originally into something a little more interesting.
About
My name is Michelle. I write, I shoot and I mom, not necessarily in that order. I'm aware that 'mom' isn't widely accepted as a verb but I think it should be.I'm a self-professed geek and caffeine addict. (Some may argue that the latter is a requirement of the former.) I live with my husband and our daughter in the California Delta.
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