Blow me a kiss
Canon 5D Mark II, 15mm F/2.8 Fisheye, f/3.5, 1/500, iso 640
I am very inspired by other bloggers, including those generous bloggers that comment here on my blog. One of my goals with the blog is to expand my own photographic horizons, and especially my "photographic vision" - to see interesting shots wherever I go. Take a look at this one and this other cool one from blog-buddy Rian for what I'm talking about. You don't get much more of a basic subject than he chose for that second shot, eh? Yet how cool is it? Very!
One of my good friends was headed to the local mall for "Black Friday," and she asked if I would like to go along. Start time? 6:00 AM! But hey, we photographers have to be prepared to be out at the crack of dawn, right?
Our mall is pretty spectacular, great architecture. So I decided I would go, a photography mission first and a shopping mission second. I ended up with 4 or 5 shots I'll share here on the blog over the next several days, quite a nice morning.
My idea was to be "in the moment" and just look for interesting architectural scenes, or anything else that caught my eye. "Man made landscapes" you might say. Use the inspiration I get from fellow bloggers and see if I'm getting anywhere with expanding my vision.
As we walked by this storefront I noticed the beautiful graphic, but also how it was framed by some of the lighting/signage. So I mounted the fisheye, got down low and looked up to get this shot.
In Lightroom I added a pretty signficant vignette to black out the edges of the image. I then used a preset called "Matt's Sin City - Dark Red" which removed a lot of the colors but left the reds. In Photoshop to add the framing (wish I could do THAT in LR!), I decided to "squish" the image a bit, to increase the fisheye effect and make the main interest wider. So I did a "resize" but turned off "Constrain Proportions" which allowed me to make it shorter, but keep the same width.
Overall I'm very pleased with this. I don't think most people would pick it out as a storefront right off the bat. I like the little glow in the upper right, and the white streaks. If you want to see the original, click on the continue link.
And hey, "blow me a kiss" with a comment!
