Tag: Adobe Lightroom

Autumn Shadows

The Gray Bull on November 7, 2020

A couple of days ago I was sitting on my deck and gazing into the woods behind the house when I noticed the sunlight filtering through the trees. The leaves and grass had changed from their early autumn color to a richer and more colorful hue. That looked great, but it was the shadows that the sunlight created that forced me to get up from a comfortable chair and go and get my camera! The photo below is the one I decided to post. I used the Adobe Landscape Profile and adjusted the hue in the shadows, but that is about all the post-processing I did for this photo.

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Fading City

The Gray Bull on May 6, 2020

The COVID19 Pandemic is keeping most of us from going out to continue our photography hobby. This means we need to find some other activities or get creative with photography outside of our tried and true routines. As I was watching a television show, and there are very few worth watching, a clip was run showing how deserted New York and other major cities looked. It was a very surreal scene, but it did give me an idea.

I proceeded to open my Adobe Lightroom catalog to find some cityscape photos I had done in the past along with some photos with trees and a few with clouds. These photos were then composited with Adobe Photoshop to create my version of a Fading City. Hopefully, our urban areas will come back to their former vibrancy but there is guarantee of that! We may all get used to an unexpected difference in urban life after COVID19.

Fading City

Hopefully, you are finding some creative outlets for practicing your photographic hobby. Please come back to visit www.cestlavie4me.com to see what shelter-in-place photography project I attempt next time. Stay healthy and keep shooting!

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Feathered Neighbors

The Gray Bull on March 24, 2020

Backyard photography can help us as we deal with Covid19 forced social distancing and the need to keep our minds occupied with something other than binge watching some streaming service. Many of you may not have a backyard or any yard at all, but you probably do have a window. Take your camera in hand and gaze into the yard or out of your apartment window and photograph something! If possible, go for a walk in your neighborhood for a little exercise and bring your camera along or just use your smartphone camera. Use your creativity and perhaps you may get lucky and photograph something interesting.

Being stuck at home can provide the opportunity to try photography techniques that are new to you, such as macro photography, using off camera flash, pet photography (if you have a handy animal), perhaps child photography is an option. Those of you living in urban areas might try some nighttime photography. The goal is to try something new and perhaps improve your photography skills. If nothing else remember “When you have lemons, make lemonade”!

Another opportunity that is available to you is that you can use these photos to improve your post-processing skills with Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop or other software programs. You can experiment with different techniques and tools.

I took my own advice a few days ago when my wife called me to see the two woodpeckers in the backyard. I am no wildlife photographer; I don’t even have a lens capable of photographing wildlife from a distance. The woodpeckers did get my attention as they furiously pecked away at a dead tree trunk on the ground, so I grabbed my camera. After firing off over 50 photos, my subjects decided to fly away. The photo below is the best one from this photo shoot.

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Now, the next challenge will be finding more backyard or indoor photography opportunities to keep me occupied. Please come back and visit www.cestlavie4me.com to see if I have found anything interesting. Now get off the couch and grab your camera and shoot!

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Great Falls Park

The Gray Bull on November 9, 2019

Great Falls Park is one of the U.S. National Park Service’s small parks in and around the Washington D.C metro area (https://www.nps.gov/grfa/index.htm). It also happens to be only about 10 miles from my home. Last week two of my granddaughters had a school holiday, so we decided to picnic at the park. The day turned out to be a beautiful, late autumn afternoon and food always tastes better at a picnic outdoors!

While the girls were playing, I took a short walk to one of the overlooks of the falls on the Potomac River. I had brought my camera, so I proceeded to take numerous photos of the falls. While processing the photos at home, I picked three of them to present in this blog post. Lately, I have become enamored with black and white photography, so I converted these to black and white by utilizing DxO Silver Efex Pro 2 after the initial processing in Adobe Lightroom. I prefer the black and white photos.

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Color Image processed with Adobe Lightroom

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Black and White version processed with DxO Silver Efex Pro 2 Preset #043 More Silver

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Color Image Processed with Adobe Lightroom. In the bottom of the photo you can see a kayaker trying to row upstream. He never made it!

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Black and White version processed with DxO Silver Efex Pro 2 Preset #023 Wet Rocks

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The last image was shot at 1/125 of a second shutter speed to stop the action of the rapids. Again, in the bottom of the photo you can see another kayaker trying to row upstream, he also failed to do that! Color Image processed with Adobe Lightroom

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Black and White version processed with DxO Silver Efex Pro 2 – no presets, just a few adjustments and a red color filter.

Please come back to visit www.cestlavie4me.com to go with me on my photographic journey to become a better photographer.

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10 Adjustments or Less

The Gray Bull on November 4, 2019

The other day, I drove to my granddaughter’s high school theatre performance. Usually, when I go to this type of event, I take my camera. This day was no exception. Since I would be taking a few photographs after the performance, I did not bring anything other than the camera and its holster. As it happened, that evening a thunderstorm was forecasted to occur during the play. After parking my car, I looked at the sky and could see some threatening clouds beginning to appear. I got creative and placed my camera on the holster as a support base, set the aperture at f18 and the ISO at 100. This gave me a somewhat long exposure, but not nearly a slow enough one. I took a few photos and proceeded to go to the play.

The next day, I imported the photos into Adobe Lightroom and viewed them. Unfortunately, none were very good, which was not a surprise. I decided to have a little fun with post-processing attempting to process one of the photos with only 10 adjustments or less. The software I used was Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop and DxO’s Silver Efex Pro 2. My goal was not to make all the versions look the same but to see what type of variety I would get with only a few adjustments. Here are the resulting photos processed with 10 or less adjustments to the original RAW file.

The first photo is the original file with only the camera calibration adjusted.

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The next photo is a color version done in Adobe Lightroom and with 10 adjustments.

Color Version-0006

I then decided to convert the photo to Black & White versions with Lightroom, Photoshop and Silver Efex Pro 2. The photo below is the Lightroom conversion in less than 10 adjustments.

Lightroom Version-0006

The adjusted color version was exported to Photoshop and in 10 adjustments I obtained the photo shown below.

Photoshop Version-2

The last version is the adjusted color version edited in Silver Efex Pro 2 with less than 10 adjustments.

Silver Efex Pro 2 Version-

None of these versions would win any awards but it was an interesting exercise in post-processing. Please come back and visit www.cestlavie4me.com to see where my photographic journey takes me next time.

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Annapolis, Maryland – Street Views

The Gray Bull on October 16, 2019

Several weeks ago, my wife and I took a short drive to Annapolis, Maryland. She had learned of a “Kunta Kinte Heritage Festival being held that day. Kunta Kinte was the main character in Alex Haley’s Best-Selling novel “Roots”. I thought it might also be a good opportunity to try some street photography and it was!

Recently, I had read The Complete Guide to Black & White Digital Photography by Michael Freeman and attempted to use some of the techniques discussed in the book in processing these photos. Here are a few of my favorite photographs from our walk around the streets of Annapolis and the Kunta Kinte Festival. I used both Adobe Lightroom and DxO Silver Efex Pro 2 to process the photos. I enjoyed the opportunity to experiment with street photography and am looking forward to more of the same soon.

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Which One?

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Girl Talk

Oblivious-

Oblivious!

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Pit Master

How Big--

How Big?

Please come back to visit www.cestlavie4me.com to continue following my photographic journey!

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Eastern Market

The Gray Bull on September 28, 2019

The Eastern Market area in Washington, DC is located within walking distance of the nation’s capitol. It was one of three public markets in Pierre L’Enfants original plans for the development of the District of Columbia. The market has undergone several reincarnations with the most recent one serving as a public market from 1873 to 2007 when it was closed. The area is now filled with retail shops, restaurants, cafes, bars, apartments, townhouses and condos. It is a wonderful example of gentrification at work!

Today, there are street markets open on weekends in the Spring and Summer. Recently, I spent and afternoon there taking photos and doing a little shopping for vintage vinyl jazz record albums! Here is one of the photos from that day. I converted it to monochrome with Adobe Lightroom and DxO Photolab Silver efex Pro software.

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Please come back to visit www.cestlavie4me.com to see where my photography journey takes me next!

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The Washington Monument

The Gray Bull on August 15, 2019

If you view any YouTube Videos about photography, you occasionally hear the term “working a photo” or taking many photos of the same subject. This is something that I have been trying to do recently as a method to hopefully improve as a photographer. A few days ago, I spent an evening in Washington, D.C. photographing the Washington Monument.

First, I decided to do my photography in the evening to employ the lighting from prior to sunset and through the blue hour. I checked the Photographer’s Ephemeris App for the sunset time and location. The plan was to have the monument backlit and hopefully a colorful sky behind it. This worked out well in helping me position where to set up my camera and tripod. Whether or not there would be a colorful sky was up to Mother Nature!

I was shooting from around 7:00pm until 9:15pm. I stayed in the same location the entire time to have nothing change but the lighting in the sky. The photos below were all processed differently, some in Adobe Lightroom, some in Adobe Photoshop and some in both. Only one photo was cropped. The evening was enjoyable both from a photography perspective and from a people watching perspective. The world is full of interesting characters and some tourists are at the top of the list! I hope you enjoy viewing these photos and perhaps you will go out and try something similar yourself.

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Please come back to visit www.cestlavie4me.com to see where I go with my photography in the future.

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ISO Practice

The Gray Bull on January 27, 2019

A couple of days ago my local library hosted an event from a nearby Chinese Arts Group. The program was to feature a Lion Dance in preparation for the upcoming Chinese New Year Celebration. I decided to go and take some photographs to see how high ISO shots would look. The primary reason for this was to help in my planning for an upcoming trip where there will be some photos that will be taken in low light and no flash or tripod is allowed. I also wanted to just use the 50mm length on my 24-70mm zoom. Interestingly, as I have looked back on several photos, it seems that many are taken between 24 and 40mm. I just wanted to see how 50mm looked by comparison.

When I arrived at the library, the group was beginning to set up, so I took a front row seat. Just before the show started, the group decided to parade through the library to gather more people for the performance. They were very successful in getting all the children and their parents who were in the library into the room for the Lion Dance. The only problem was they had all the children sit on the floor in front of me. That ended my obstruction free viewing area. As usual Adobe Photoshop came to the rescue in post-processing as you will see.

I took many photos but decided to only use one in this blogpost. It was taken at 1/50 shutter speed, f4.0 aperture and 53mm focal length. I set the ISO at 1600 and when I checked a test shot’s histogram, I was getting a good exposure “to the right”. The motion blur was intentional because the subjects were dancing, and I wanted to show movement. The drummer and cymbal player are acceptably sharp. Here is the photo that has been edited in Adobe Lightroom.

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There are several distractions in the above photo, heads of children, a clock and the flipchart cabinet behind one of the dancers. I edited the photo in Adobe Photoshop and used the patch tool on the heads and clock. No problem with those edits. The big job was removing the flipchart cabinet. I decided to use Layers and Selections along with the patch tool and managed to do a reasonable removal of the unwanted object. This blog is not a how-to do it blog, you can check some videos on YouTube as I did to see how this technique works. Here is the edited photo.

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The conclusion I have made is ISO 1600 worked well enough: however, there is some noise in the photo, and I learned a new technique in Photoshop. The 53mm focal length does narrow the field of view, yet it still retains a pleasing amount of image. I will consciously try to use that focal length more in the future, it may help prevent some of the cropping I have done in the past and eliminate the loss of any photographic data. Please come back and visit www.Cestlavie4me.com to see how my progress in photography is doing.

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Its Snow Wonderful!

The Gray Bull on January 14, 2019

Ok, that is a well-worn and tired cliché, but I needed a title for this blog post. I live in Northern Virginia and large snow storms are an infrequent occurrence. This past weekend we did have a nice snowfall and it made for a beautiful winter scene in my backyard.

Snow can be difficult to photograph if you only pay attention to the light meter readings in your camera’s viewfinder. I am not a technical expert, but I do know that most built-in light meters are programmed to optimize something called 18% gray. This usually works out well enough except when photographing snow. If you just use the meter to set your camera then you will probably get a photo with gray snow! Usually not a good image! I most often shoot with at least one stop more light than the meter indicates, and the result is white snow. This is also referred to as exposing to the right. You sometimes need to adjust up or down depending on how bright the snow may be.

As I was looking at my backyard it occurred to me that there were a few simple compositions that might yield some attractive photographs. Here are two of my favorites from my backyard. Both photos were post-processed with Adobe Lightroom and I placed vignettes to center the viewers attention on the bird feeders in the frame.

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Lonely House

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Frozen Food

Hopefully these photos highlight the fact that you can usually find photo opportunities almost anywhere if you just take a few moments to look around.

Please come back and visit www.cestlavie4me.com to see where my photographic journey takes me next.