A couple of months ago HDR photographer Trey Ratcliff held a photo walk at Stanford University. It was a beautiful late afternoon – and some 200 photographers showed up to join Trey for his second photowalk around the Stanford Campus.
This shot was taken with my tiny Canon PowerShot S95 and post-processed in Photoshop using Nik Software’s Color Efex Pro 4 – in particular the Details Enhancer and Cross Processing Filters.
I titled it Breaking Away – with the bicyclist heading home…ignoring the crowd.
Here’s an image from a recent visit to Stockholm, Sweden – shot just at sunrise with my tiny Canon PowerShot S95.
I did a bit of post-processing using a combination of David Nightingale’s curves adjustments along with Nik’s Color Efex Pro 4. I love how these colors turned out – they so captured my memory of this morning.
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.
Maybe it’s the visit to the Ansel Adams show with Chris on Saturday that has sent me over the edge, but I’m continually intrigued by how one can take a color photo and turn it into a much more powerful black and white image.
See the photo below – it’s #3 from my initial Canon S95 HDR post earlier this morning.
Frankly, I didn’t spend much time on this photo – the point was to provide it (a traditional HDR post-processed shot) as a point of comparison with the new in-camera HDR feature built-in to the S95.
As I was looking at it, I wondered how a conversion to black and white might look – now that I’ve become acquainted and familiar with Lightroom 3’s excellent Black and White Mix controls.
So, I gave it a shot – here’s the result – after about 10 minutes of tweaking in Lightroom:
Obviously, it’s the same subject as the original photo – Rodin’s Gates of Hell – but it’s been transformed into a more powerful photograph through the conversion to black and white.
I also experimented for the first time using the new Lens Correction features in Lightroom 3 – to remove the distortion in terms of angle, etc. that I had in the original image. It now looks very close to a direct, head-on shot at the scuplture.
Finally, I tweaked it in Flickr – using Picnik to add a museum frame around it – dressing it up a bit.
