This is one of my favorite shots from Havana. As Doug Kaye and I toured the Museum of the Revolution with the rest of our group, some ceremonial music started playing and I peeked out the window to see this honor guard marching across the street. I loved the sun angle and their shadows.
In this version, I did a quick pass through Topaz Simplify 4 – using one of the black and white presets – and then brought it back as into Photoshop using a Luminance blend mode. A beautiful example of how Simplify works its magic!
During our first full day in Havana, we visited the campus of the University of Havana. While exploring the hilltop campus location, I came across this student having a conference with what I assume is one of her professors. They were sitting near the end of a long hallway and the natural light was streaming in from the north – giving her face that special kind of diffused glow.
To complete the processing, I cropped the image significantly, using empty space as an offset in the darker area down the hallway on the left. I finished it using some Lab color tweaks in Photoshop along with a slight luminosity adjustment layer created using Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2 (see Doug Kaye’s technique for this).
I originally thought I’d process this as a monochrome image – but I loved the contrast between her reddish shirt and her teacher’s blue dress and wanted to maintain that look in the final image.
On our first morning in Havana (January 24, 2013), I headed out on Dawn Patrol (our leader’s term for departing the hotel at 6:15 AM sharp). We walked down to the harbor and then worked our way back. Along the way back, I snapped this image of a Havana street scene just waking up.
Last Sunday I headed up to China Camp State Park in Marin County. I had never been to China Camp before this visit.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, China Camp is a beautiful spot on th western shores of San Francisco Bay. China Camp Village has some very interesting old buildings – and this wonderful, quirky, old pier that juts out into the bay.
I shot a number of different images of this pier – from the left, from the right, and down the middle. I used two big DSLRs – my new Nikon D600, my old faithful Canon 5D Mark II, my iPhone 5, and the camera I used for this particular shot – my tiny Canon PowerShot S100. I continue to be delighted how many great “spur of the moment” shots I capture with this camera (and its earlier versions, the PowerShot S90 and PowerShot S95 – both of which I bought new and subsequently sold as I upgraded along the way).
This was a RAW image shot with the S100, minimally adjusted in Lightroom 4.3 and then brought into Photoshop CS6. I went through my full sequence of steps to enhance the image in the Lab colorspace – before deciding that I thought I’d prefer the final result in monochrome. I used Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2 to do the black and white conversion before bringing it back into Lightroom for a couple of final tweaks.
This was a very satisfying image for me. Watching it evolve through the Lab color enhancement process was fun – and then the move into monochrome with Silver Efex was especially exciting. Hope you like it too!
Just east of San Rafael in California’s Marin County lies China Camp State Park. It’s a beautiful setting on the west side of San Francisco Bay and delights with a number of stunning Bay views. Among the more interesting spots is the China Camp Village – site of this dock, a beach area, picnic tables and the Quan Bros. snack shop (open on weekends). It’s a delight – and a wonderful place for photography.
I had some used lenses to try out that I’d gotten from my late friend Chris Gulker and decided to head to China Camp for the first time to try them out. This particular image, however, was taken with my trusty Canon 5D Mark II looking down the dock at China Camp Village. I post-processed it using Lightroom 4.3, Photoshop CS6, and Nik’s Color Efex Pro 4 filters. I purposely subdued the tone of the image a bit to an almost film like quality – preferring this version to the brighter one I originally shot as it came straight out of the camera.
Note: Lots of photographers use neutral density filters to smooth the water via a long exposure setting. Here’s a great example of one of those kinds of images – shot by Swee Oh on a recent long exposure photo walk. I don’t yet own a neutral density filter – so this shot is just a normal one with the subtle waves showing in the Bay water.
Earlier today, Adobe’s Julieanne Kost shared some images of succulents she made using the Oil Paint filter in Photoshop CS6. They were great – and brought me back to images of a succulent wall that I had taken using my tiny Canon PowerShot S90 at the Sunset Magazine Celebration Weekend in June 2010. This was a display by Succulent Gardens of Castroville, CA.
I pulled this image into Photoshop and tweaked the Oil Paint filter in initially add the artistic strokes. After that, I followed with a modified Picture Postcard workflow to add more depth followed by a trip in Lab color to bring out some of the colors. Fun!
On New Year’s Day, I’ve got a tradition of heading to San Francisco to take pictures. I usually head for the Golden Gate Bridge – exploring various vantage points as I get closer to the bridge.
Baker Beach is often a favorite – and this year the view was gorgeous. I headed down closer to the edge of the surf for this show – taken with my Nikon D600.
I processed it simply – bringing it into Photoshop CS6 from Lightroom, applying two Nik Color Efex Pro 4 filters (Brilliance/Warmth) and Tonal Contrast followed by a Lab color layer – before using Imagenomic Noiseware to remove the noise and then bringing it back into Lightroom. The colors in this version are much more postcard like (warmer) than the original.
Another one of my New Year’s Day explorations at the Golden Gate Bridge was Battery Boutelle. The symmetry of this image is what captured me – shot handheld with my Nikon D600. I converted it to monochrome in Photoshop CS6 using Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2 – and then brought it into Lightroom and applied another one of Trey Ratcliff’s Lightroom Presents – A Crisp Start – to add this particular tone.
While I was exploring around the Golden Gate Bridge yesterday as part of my New Year’s Day tradition, I parked at the parking lot on Merchant Road just south of the bridge entrance and walked briefly up one of the bluffs in the area to take this shot.
It was taken handheld with my Nikon D600 and cropped/tweaked in Photoshop CS6 using ALCE, some Lab color techniques, etc. The upper crossbeams in the south tower and the eastern side cable both seem to be in need of a paint job! Click on the image to see a larger version on Flickr.
My photo adventure yesterday over to the coast was one of those rare ones – I captured so many great images very quickly in the beautiful light and cloudy skies. It truly was a photographer’s winter delight!
I enjoy exploring a wide range of post-processing techniques with my images. Realism is fine – and many (most?) of my images are exactly that – realistic as shot in the field.
But, sometimes, you find a special image that you just want to “push” – off into a different, more artistic direction. Yesterday’s lighthouse shots at Pigeon Point are just the latest example.
I processed this image as a single image HDR from the original RAW file shot handheld with my Canon D600. I used Photomatix Pro for that initial HDR conversion and then imported the image into Photoshop CS6. After a few tweaks in Adobe Camera Raw, I used Nik’s Color Efex Pro 4’s Brilliance/Warmth filter in two passes to shift the color of the sun. There’s something about the warmth of this kind of processing that adds to our appreciation of an image – and it seemed to work in this case.
Finally, I used a few Content Aware fills in Photoshop on various chunks of the sky to smooth things out a bit and remove some potentially distracting artifacts. And I was done.
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