Doug Kaye and I were heading from Old Town to the Gas Lamp district in downtown San Diego when this aircraft appeared overhead inbound to San Diego’s Lindbergh Field.
Doug was driving and I was “mapping” when I saw the plane coming. I was able to fire off one iPhone shot – admittedly a bit blurry at that! Hardly perfect – but a fun memory all the same. Stylized a bit using VSCOcam. Tweaked a bit using the Shake Reduction filter in Photoshop CC.
This afternoon brought the horrible news of the crash of Asiana Flight 214 – a Boeing 777-200ER with tail number HL7742 – while landing at San Francisco International Airport. The day couldn’t have been more perfect weather wise – so one has to wonder what the cause might be.
As I was editing some photos earlier today, I wanted to try out a new black and white post-processing technique and had picked a recent image I’d taken here in Menlo Park a few days ago of a Rose of Sharon flower – actually a double-flower which is what had caught my eye and caused me to take the shot while on the go with my iPhone 5.
This new technique for post-processing black and white is all about the tonality of the image – and this seemed to be a good one to practice on. So I loaded the image into Photoshop CC and began my editing.
As I was getting ready to share the image online, I did a quick Wikipedia search and discovered that Rose of Sharon – formally “Hibiscus syriacus” – is the national flower of South Korea. I had also just learned – from Twitter – that there were now two confirmed deaths in the Asiana crash. Not sure what this all means – but somehow this image came together this afternoon around the same time I learned of the tragic result. My heart goes out to all of those affected by today’s unfortunate incident.
I’ve been taking advantage of the holiday (July 4th) today to do some reading and exploring around the use of textures in images. I find that the addition of a texture or two to an image can add additional visual interest – especially those images that have large areas of sky or water.
With Photoshop CC, Adobe’s Russell Brown has made available a new panel extension – Adobe Paper Texture Pro – which comes pre-loaded with a number of excellent textures from Flypaper Textures. Using these textures – along with the built-in Photoshop watercolor filter, I added a couple of textures to this image shot using my iPhone 5 from a bus as we were coming into Havana following our flight. It was late afternoon in late January – near the “golden hour”!
Earlier today, photo buddy Doug Kaye and I met up at the de Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for one of our monthly photo shoots. We try to get out for a few hours before lunch on a roughly monthly schedule and then head to a nice spot to share lunch and chat. Today Doug wanted to learn more about Bitcoin – but that’s a story for another day!
We’re starting to have a few favorite venues for these photo shoots. Embarcadero Center and the Ferry Building seem to be at the top of our list – there’s always great shots available there. It’s a beautiful combination of great architecture, that amazing fountain, the Ferry Building shops/restaurants (Slanted Door!) and street photography. So much in such a beautiful spot.
This morning we headed to the de Young – I think this was our second time shooting there together. A great thing about the De Young is that they allow photography in their permanent collection areas – and they’ve got some great collections! Another great thing is the tower that rises up about ten stories above the museum and provides a remarkable floor to ceiling view of the western part of San Francisco. It’s a special spot – and a great example of what Jay Maisel calls a “stage” – a place just to observe as people come and go. We’re becoming pretty good at spotting these stage opportunities – during our trip to Havana Cuba earlier this year we found a couple that we great spots.
This image is one of those shot on the stage – and, for me, it captures the sheer delight these little devices bring into our lives. She took a couple of iPhone shots from this end of the tower – and that look on her face says it all!
This image was shot with my Canon PowerShot S100 – and post-processed mostly in Lightroom 5 with a few final tweaks in Photoshop CC. Below is a shot of Doug “working the stage” in the tower at the de Young!
I’ve begun playing a bit with some of the new features in Photoshop CC (even after complaining about it so loudly!)
One of the new features is the Shake Reduction filter (found under Filter/Sharpen/Shake Reduction). Here’s an example of what this can do using an image I shot recently with my iPhone 5. I thought I was holding the iPhone pretty steady – but it’s an indoor shot and the camera probably had to adjust – the metadata says the shutter speed was 1/20th of a second – clearly not ideal for a handheld shot.
In addition to have some camera shake, the image isn’t very will lined up – although I sure thought it was at the time I took it! So, in creating this final image, I also used the new Upright feature that’s included in Camera Raw 8.1 – which, in yet another new feature, can now be run on a layer INSIDE Photoshop – pretty cool!
So, 3 quick steps in Photoshop CC, a bit of noise reduction and a touch of sharpening both added back in Lightroom 5 produced this significantly improved version of that original iPhone 5 image:
While touring Hunters Point in San Francisco with Doug Kaye, we rounded a corner and suddenly noticed this old upright piano – left abandoned outside the Submarine Cafeteria building. Still proud, lots of structure, but well past its prime.
Shot with my iPhone 5. Post processed in Photoshop CS6 with Nik’s Color Efex Pro 2.
An experiment in black and white – image from a portion of a carving hanging on a wall in a Hawaii hotel – with some very special sunlight streaming in from the left side.
Shot with my iPhone 5 and post-processed using Nik’s Snapseed on my iPhone.
Over breakfast this morning, I stumbled across a recommendation for the iOS application (both iPad and iPhone) My Sketch – which costs $1.99. I installed it and tried it out on one of my recent photos – which took all of about 30 seconds for me to complete and save! I liked the look of the pencil sketch lines coming into the image very much like the rays of light behind him actually did at the time I shot the image.
See more of my shots from Havana and Cuba here.
Once in a while, I’ll snap a quick shot on my iPhone and, sometime later, come back and look at it more closely. This is one of those images – shot yesterday at Sharon Park in Menlo Park while out for a walk with Lily. I had just come back from the Menlo Park Library where I’d spent an hour or two looking through some of their great books – including a huge book on the French Impressionists and a large 1974 collection of Ansel Adams’ images.
Perhaps some sort of combination of those two is what I saw when I snapped this shot while on the go with my iPhone 5. I opted to post process it using Topaz Simplify 4 – with the Black and White I preset brought back into Photoshop in Luminosity blend mode. I then added an Oil Paint layer – that impressionist effect working a bit of its magic on me!
Here’s a late afternoon panorama shot taken with my iPhone 5 up on the 9th floor rooftop at the Parque Central Hotel in Havana, Cuba. Click on the image to see a larger version!
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