On Sunday, I often like to take a walk around the Stanford University campus. Parking is usually easy on weekends (except game days!) and there’s so much to explore. I can get a nice hour long walk in and capture some interesting images along the way. Lily and I used to do this regularly – and I still miss her whenever I’m walking Stanford.
Here’s a shot taken with my new Fujifilm X-E2 at Stanford this past Sunday. I was walking around the Quad when I noticed this young woman coming towards me – right in the middle of the walkway. As she got to the stairs, she stopped, looked at her smartphone and began talking – clearly she was in a FaceTime video chat with someone. I thought the like was very beautiful with the striking contrast with the shadows – and snapped this image with the Fujifilm X-E2.
When I got home, I post-processed the image a bit using both Lightroom 5 and Photoshop CC. For shots that tend to be “busy”, I often use Topaz Simplify 4 to remove some of that busyness – and I did that on this image. If you look closely (click on the image to see a larger version), you can see that there’s lots of detail in the center where she is but that as you move out to the edges the details fall away and you just see the major elements of the image. That’s Topaz Simplify in action.
I also applied a touch of cinematic toning (orange-ish highlights, blue-ish shadows) using Lightroom 5’s split toning panel before declaring the image complete!
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