This is one of my favorite shots of the FV Point Reyes aground at Inverness – this time enhanced using the Ancient Urban texture from French Kiss textures with the Linear Light blend mode in Photoshop with a layer mask over the Point Reyes.
Earlier, I tried doing a black and white conversion of this image – and it’s just way to contrasty for my taste. This image – with the texture addition – captures the moment much more effectively.
What do you think?
My photography workflow has evolved significantly over the last couple of years – “evolved” being perhaps a euphemism for “gotten more complicated”! I’ve been influenced by paying attention to the workflow of others – picking up tips especially from watching Trey Ratcliff and others as they’ve shared their approaches. I’ve wanted to write this down for my own reference – and, now that I’ve written it up, thought it might be worth sharing as well. So, read on for my photography workflow – as it stands today.
Pepper season has arrived at our local Menlo Park Farmers Market – and they look great!
Our favorite pepper from local grower Happy Quail Farms isn’t actually shown in the image – be sure to try the Pimientos de Padrón, a specialty of the farm and a great accompaniment to almost any grilled meat dish! Many Bay Area chefs say the best locally-produced sweet and hot peppers come from this small East Palo Alto Farm.
This photo was shot as a RAW with my Canon 5D Mark II using the Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 IS L lens from about 10 feet away. Photomatix Pro was just for post-processing with some final tweaks being done using Lightroom 3.
I headed up to San Francisco this morning to attend a Scott Kelby photography session at the Adobe Photoshop & You building on Sutter Street. Scott’s session was great – all about shooting with continuous light as opposed to strobes – I really learned a lot.
Along the way, I happened across this cable car heading up Powell St. Lucky 13 I called it. The shot was taken with my tiny Canon PowerShot S95 – in RAW – and then post-processed into a single shot HDR using Photomatix Pro. I then imported it to Lightroom, made a few more minor tweaks (mostly desaturating it a bit) and the posting it to Flickr.
In terms of composition – and this was totally random – I love that the guy in front is a photographer – and he’s hungry for the upcoming shot up the Powell Street hill!
This week I’m in the Monterey/Carmel area for a few days attending a security conference. Tonight, I hopped over the hill to Carmel to meet a good friend for dinner at Grasing’s – which was superb by the way!
I headed over a bit early and did some exploring around Carmel Beach. This particular gnarly tree really caught my eye – and I took a couple of shots in RAW using my tiny Canon PowerShot S95.
The image seemed destined for black and white – so after a bit of HDR post-processing I pulled it into Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2 and ended up with this result. Lots of busy-ness in this image – but love the range of tones!
Wow, here’s one more shot from this weekend’s photowalk yesterday at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco! When I arrived, the sky was grey and overcast – foggy – typical for July at this venue in San Francisco.
So, I decided not to try to shoot any traditional exposure bracketed shots – the normal drill for HDR photography – because the contrast just wasn’t there without the sun and the shadows. Instead, I just shot single shot RAW photos – which you can see here in this Flickr set.
After playing around a bit with textures this morning, I decided to see what some single-shot HDR (High Dynamic Range) images might look like after processing with Photomatix Pro. The image above is one of those I processed.
What was interesting to me was how the HDR process brought out the full dome – whereas the dome was almost invisible in the normal shots. The sky is classic HDR – almost always gets darker and moody.
What’s special about this shot for me? The swan. She’s a small detail overall in this image – but I really enjoyed watching her move across the water as I was setting up for this shot.
Hope you also enjoy this image! Share your thoughts in a comment below…
Perhaps my tricky title fooled you? No, I’m not thinking of airplanes – but of flat surfaces – those kinds of planes.
We had some interesting weather and skies in the San Francisco area this afternoon – so I headed over for a walk around the north side of the Stanford University campus – and came upon this scene. It’s the David Packard Electrical Engineering building – shot as a single image RAW using my little Canon PowerShot S95 and post-processed using PhotoMatix Pro. This is a more realistic HDR – where the effects are more subtle and photorealistic.
The sun was behind the clouds over to the left side of the image – so there were no dark contrasty shadows but, instead, some beautiful light. When I look at this image, it flips back and forth around the centerline in my mind – fascinating effect! Do you see that too? Click here to see a larger version on a black background.
Hope you like it! If you do, let me know in the comments!
By the way, this image makes an incredible desktop image for your Mac – use the “Stretch to Fill Screen” setting to widen it out – beautiful!
Last weekend, Doug Kaye and I attended Maker Faire Bay Area 2011 and had a blast shooting lots of images. I had both my “big” camera (Canon EOS 5D Mark II) and my “little” camera (Canon PowerShot S95) – shooting in RAW on both.
The image above is one from my little S95 – of a Tesla Coil machine (or some such – no quite sure what to call it!) taken outdoors at the Faire. It was a single image RAW file. To post-process the image, I went through three additional steps – tone mapping, double tone mapping, and then final adjustments/tweaks in PhotoShop.
You can follow each of the steps by viewing each of the four images in this set on Flickr and reading the description where I describe each step.
Hope you find it interesting!
Up top in Rodin’s Gates of Hell sculpture sits the Thinker – pondering everything. The Gates is an amazing sculpture and beautifully displayed outdoors at Stanford’s Cantor Art Center.
This image was taken with my little Canon PowerShot S95. It was converted from original RAW using Lightroom 3 followed by a black and white conversion performed using Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2.
I like the way it turned out – hope you do too!
You can’t help but smile at this entrance to Luna Park in Sydney Australia. This shot was taken with my little Canon PowerShot S95 while we were on the ferry heading over to National Maritime Museum in Darling Harbor. It’s hard to believe that it’s almost two months ago that we were in Sydney!
I post-processed this as a single image HDR – focusing it on the smiley face in the center and desaturating the edges. Hope you enjoy this photo!
For more of my Sydney photos, see this Flickr group.
You must be logged in to post a comment.