Canon 5D Mark II, 180mm F/3.5 Macro, f/5.6, 1/2000, iso 640
On Friday night I saw we had a clear sky, after a rainy afternoon. I was determined to go out Saturday morning if it remained clear, which it did. But it was also extremely windy. But as I have relayed here before on the blog, Dad always said "can't catch a fish if your line isn't in the water."
My real goal was to try to get some shots of leaves moving around. Slow shutter, with some fixed background, so that looking at the image you could "feel the wind." Well, I had no success there. It was so bright out, that I could never get a slow enough shutter for it to work. I tried a series of images stacked in photoshop to achieve this, but it wasn't working for me.
But anyway, some "magic" happened anyway. Like this shot, and several others I'll be sharing. And even a Christmas present! I took the shot I plan to show on Christmas day. Yippee.
So back to today's shot then, shall we? I was just driving around where I live. I spotted a pond that I had shot before. There were nice fall colors hanging over the pond, so I parked and tried shooting them. Hmmm. Nothing spectacular. Then I noticed all the leaves sitting in the bottom of the pond - hey that could be good. So I shot a few of those. Then I remembered the time I threw leaves into the pond (a different one) and shot the leaves floating away.
I tried that, but my artificial contributions looked, er, artificial. Just clumps of leaves. As I contemplated what to do, leaves started blowing in on their own, right in front of me. With the wind howling, I had to track the leaves, practically panning. I loosened the ball on my tripod head and followed several. This was the best one. I give credit to the amazing color and "sun stars" to the amazing 180mm Macro.
Are we having a time warp here? Is this Topaz Tuesday and I forgot to mention it? This image looks heavily modified, doesn't it. Well, amazingly it is not. About 20 seconds in Lightroom. Click the continue link and I'll show you the pre-process look, and I'm also going to do a little mini-tutorial on Lightroom.
Lightroom screen capture: before / after, split horizontally.
It seems some of my friends have not converted to Lightroom yet. This makes me feel bad because as a (mostly) Photoshop Refugee, I know how much time they are wasting, not to mention all the capabilities that they do not have. One of those capabilities is the before and after split view. Above we have the horizontal version.
And here we have the vertical version. Obviously this makes it super easy to see how the changes you are making are affecting the image, compared to the original.
The changes I made to this shot were basically to enhance the colors and help us see through the water. How did I do this? Let's see:
See where it says "Presence" on the right? Each of those sliders begins at 0 with your original image. You slide them back and forth to achieve a certain look. Then there is the Tone Curve (Curves, in PS parlance). You can see I enhanced the dark area, and increased the light. Kind of an exaggerated version of the classic "S" curve we use in PS.
As you can see, it's incredibly easy to use these sliders to achieve the look you want. It takes a LONG time to learn this in PS, whereas here in LR it's right in your face.
Not to mention that all these changes are "non destructive." That's right, your original is never changed. LR just remembers your changes for each image, and applies them in real time so you can see the effect. You can go back a year later, see what changes you made, play with them, reverse them, etc.
Like some people might say I dialed in a little too much saturation. No problem!
This is how digital image processing was meant to be friends! Photoshop is a blunt instrument by comparison. And I say that confident that not many people spent as much time learning and doing in Photoshop as I have. People doing photography full time or graphic artists excepted - I have one heckuva lot of time learning PS. Now I use it only when "I have to" and it isn't any fun at all.
Comments welcome!
