Category: Lightroom

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Lightroom Photography Photography - Canon PowerShot S95 Sydney

Oh Sydney!

Morning Glory - Sydney - 2012

Last Friday evening, my colleague Carol Coye Benson and I flew to Sydney for a few days of teaching and consulting. With the flight over from San Francisco, you lose a day enroute – leaving late Friday and arriving early Sunday morning. After arriving, I headed over to Circular Quay and the Sydney Opera House with my tiny Canon PowerShot S100 in hand.

This is one of the shots from my walk – a family posing for a group shot on the upper level at the Opera House. The light was really special that morning – and the processing I’ve used on this version tries to highlight that special morning glow. I post-processed this using Nik’s Color Efex Pro 4 and Trey Ratcliff’s new Lightroom presets.

Hope you like it! It’s amazing to me that you can board an airplane, fly for over 13 hours and end up on the other side of the world.

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Lightroom Photography Photography - Canon 5D Mark II San Francisco/California Stages Street Photography

Light Me Up – Chinatown San Francisco – 2012

Light Me Up - San Francisco - 2012

This image is from a day of photo walking with Doug Kaye in Chinatown and North Beach neighborhoods in San Francisco in late March 2012. Chinatown is so rich with photographic opportunities that we were moving very slowly while doing a lot of street photography.

When street shooting this way, it’s great fun to try to find a stage – a venue that has visual interest all by itself – and then to wait for human subjects to appear on that stage. In this case, there’s a building on the north side of one of the streets with a pseudo-American flag painted on the wall. We stood on the opposite side of the street and waiting for interesting folks to appear on the stage – capturing many different images. This was one of the best – a smoker standing back against the wall and looking up at the bright morning sun.

Taken with a Canon 5D Mark II using the 70-200mm f/2.8L lens – shot at 80mm, 1/1600, f/4. Post-processed in Lightroom.

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HDR Photography Lightroom Photography Photography - Canon 5D Mark II Photoshop

The Lighthouse #3 – Pigeon Point – 2012

The Lighthouse #3 - Pigeon Point - 2012

This image of the Pigeon Point Lighthouse was shot on January 13, 2012, during shoot with my photo buddy Doug Kaye. We started out at the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve near Half Moon Bay and then headed south along US 1 to Pigeon Point. The light was very special that day – this image was shot about 1 PM but you can see the sun angle is still not very high.

The new version of Lightroom 4.1 has 32 bit HDR Tiff handling support – so I used Merge to HDR Pro in Photoshop CS6 to blend three images together (taken on a tripod using +/-2 EV exposure bracketing with my Canon 5D Mark II). I brought the image back into Lightroom and make a few final tweaks – love how this version turned out! Click on the image to see a larger version!

And be sure to checkout my earlier post Coasting in 2012 – Pigeon Point Lighthouse for a black and white image of the Pigeon Point Lighthouse!

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Lightroom Monochrome Photography Nik Software Photography San Francisco/California

Looking Back…

This is one of those weekends that provokes a look back. As I wrote last year, these two days in March will never be quite the same.

I spent some time tonight looking back at my photo archive and ended up settling on a few shots taken in 2008 – from a trip to Sausalito and Fort Baker. These were both taken on the same day in March 2008 with my since retired Canon EOS 40D DSLR (a really great camera, IMHO!) – and I processed them for the first time tonight. Most of the processing was done in Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2 and Lightroom 4.

Up top is a shot taken at Fort Baker of a woman fishing out in the Bay. I chose a traditional monochrome view for this shot.

Below is a San Francisco bay and skyline shot taken from Sausalito. This one, while also monochrome, has different toning applied – appropriate to the sky/water elements in this image.

I love both of these images – they bring back lots of memories of that day! Hope you like them! Click on either image to see a larger version.

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HDR Photography Lightroom Photography Photoshop

More on HDR Processing Workflows using Lightroom, Photoshop

Doug Kaye has added a new post that describes several workflows – including his new favorite – for High Dynamic Range (HDR) image processing using Lightroom, Photoshop and tools such as Unified Color’s HDR Expose/32 Float, LR/Enfuse, Photomatix Pro, Nik’s HDR Efex Pro, and more.

If you’re wanting to try HDR photography, Doug’s pretty much covered the bases on the various post-processing alternatives. I’m looking forward to trying out his newly recommended favorite technique using 32 Float in Photoshop!

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Half Moon Bay HDR Photography Lightroom Nik Software Photography Photography - Canon 5D Mark II Photomatix Pro

The Tunnel View at Fitzgerald Marine Reserve

Yesterday, Doug Kaye and I headed out on a glorious January morning for some photography shooting over on the coast. We headed first to one of my favorite spots – Fitzgerald Marine Reserve north of Half Moon Bay. This county park has an iconic row of trees that offer a beautiful setting for us photographers. On some mornings, you’ll get fog – on others, a mix of fog and sun. Yesterday we had a glorious bright sun – but with that low sun angle this time of year.

I call this image “Tunnel View” – mimicking the Yosemite shots of that same name. I just love how these trees frame the path – and provide their own tunnel. The sun and shadows add layers to the image.

I shot this with my Canon 5D Mark II with the Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 IS L lens – and post-processed it from a single RAW file using Lightroom to export 0/+/-2 exposure JPEGS for processing in Photomatix Pro. I imported that result into Photoshop CS5 and further tweaked the image using Nik’s Viveza 2, Color Efex Pro 4 and the amazing Silver Efex Pro 2. I did a final blend in Photoshop before importing back into Lightroom for some final tweaks, noise reduction, a touch of vignette and a bit of love (!).

Hope you enjoy it!

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Black and White Lighthouse Lightroom Nik Software Photography Photography - Black & White Photography - Canon 5D Mark II Photomatix Pro

Coasting in 2012 – Pigeon Point Lighthouse

All Aglow - Pigeon Point - 2012

This morning I met up with Doug Kaye over on the coast – for a morning of shooting – of the photography kind. We started at the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve and then headed south to Pigeon Point Lighthouse before heading to Pescadero and Duarte’s Tavern (DOO-arts they say!) for a great cracked Dungeness crab lunch.

I’ve really come to appreciate these photo shoots with a friend – especially one who, like Doug, is pushing new frontiers and trying new techniques. As we explore a venue, we see through each other’s eyes – and see things we otherwise wouldn’t see. Try it sometime. It’s great fun!

This image is of the Pigeon Point Lighthouse on the San Mateo County coastline south of Pescadero. The light this morning was beautiful – and this black and white treatment features it!

This image was shot as a 3 image handheld HDR with my Canon 5D Mark II. I post-processed it first with Photomatix Pro (using undeveloped JPEGs exported from Lightroom 3 and Photomatix alignment by features), and then opened in Photoshop CS5. In Photoshop, I first adjusted with Nik’s Color Efex Pro 4 – specifically, tonal contrast and detail extractor. Then I brought the image into Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2 before finally bringing back into Lightroom for final tweaking, noise reduction, and uploading.

I’ll always remember this day and our time coasting the San Mateo coast! Beautiful!

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HDR Photography Lightroom Photography Photomatix Pro Photoshop

A Better Approach to HDR Processing Workflow with Adobe Lightroom

Last year, I wrote a bit about my mid-2011 photography processing workflow. I talked about how, for single-image HDR processing using RAW images, I would open them in Photomatix Pro rather than using Lightroom’s export image capability. I also wrote how, for HDR bracketed images, I did use Lightroom’s export image capability to convert them to JPEGs for processing in PhotoMatix pro.

My friend Doug Kaye has shared his new insights about a better workflow for HDR processing – one that maximizes the dynamic range available for post-processing rather than limits it as the Lightroom export flow automatically does. Be sure to read his insights – along with those of Klaus Herrmann who introduced the notion creating extended EV value images as TIFF files from the original bracketed RAW images in his article “Creating HDR Images the Right Way.” If you have comments for Doug, please share them on his Google+ post.

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Black and White Golden Gate Lightroom Nik Software Photography Photography - Black & White Photography - Canon 5D Mark II San Francisco/California

New Year’s Day 2012 at the Golden Gate

New Year's Day - San Francisco - 2012

In what’s become sort of a tradition for me, on New Year’s Day I head for the Golden Gate and see what I can find to start the new year off right.

Today, my favorite venue was blocked by construction fencing – so I headed to my next favorite venue – Baker Beach. I happened to arrive just as the California Hornblower sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge.

This image was shot in RAW with my Canon 5D Mark II and then processed tonight in Photoshop using Nik’s Color Efex Pro 4 and Silver Efex Pro 2 before importing into Lightroom 3 for final cropping (16:9), toning, sharpening and noise reduction.

There were a lot of people enjoying Baker Beach when I shot the original image – but they were removed using the content-aware healing brush in Photoshop CS5 – yielding this final image. I’m sure they don’t mind! 😉

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Lightroom Photography Photography - Canon 5D Mark II

Blue Pumpkin

Blue Pumpkin - Menlo Park - 2011

Order a Limited Edition print of this photo

This morning I headed out to Nativity School’s Posh Squash annual fund raiser – selling all manor of glass pumpkins. A couple of my other shots are over on InMenlo.

This was one of my personal favorites – love the blue tone, the texture, and the twirling stem! Minimal post-processing was involved – just adding a bit of a vignette in Lightroom. This image was shot using my Canon 5D Mark II with the Canon 135mm f/2 L lens.