Canon 5D Mark II, 15mm F/2.8 Fisheye, f/9.0, 1/250, iso 100
My wife and I recently took a day off to have lunch out and just go for a drive up in the snow. No specific destination. Brought my camera gear, of course. It was really a beaut day. "Chamber of Commerce" weather as they say.
I took about 50 shots. I was pretty excited, the scenery was really nice. I was trying for "snow forms." Nice organic contours, maybe just a few plants, that kind of thing.
When I got home and viewed them in Lightroom however, nothing really appealed that much to me. I tried hard to like some of them, but none of them were calling to me. So I let it go for a week or so.
This morning I looked through them again, and this one seemed to have some promise. It's another situation where I'm kind of ambivalent and don't know if the image will resonate with anyone or not.
We had driven around Donner Lake, and were back as far as you can go. I had great cell coverage so I decided to call The Cheerleader to see how he was doing. We had a nice but brief chat. While talking with him I noticed this stand of trees off to the side of the road. After we ended the call, I thought this seemed like a fisheye opportunity, so I mounted that lens and just walked down the road.
In Lightroom I began with a preset called Cinema Cold that definitely punched it up a bit. I made a few other adjustments, cloned out some power lines, and there we are. I picked the title because it's one of those days when I'm unsure about my image. I didn't think about The Cheerleader angle until I was already into post processing, so I suppose that is what is actually behind the selection of this image of all the others I took that day.
Oh. I also used the LR GND (Graduated Neutral Density) adjustment on this shot, that's what brought out the blue sky. Since Toni asked about this the other day, let's have a brief tutorial on the continue page, shall we?
Here we have a partial capture of my Lightroom Screen. I'm in the develop module.
GND Filters have been around forever. You put them on the front of your lens when you want to reduce the exposure of a given area. Most often, you have a sky and a foreground. The sky is much brighter. If you expose for the sky, the foreground is too dark. If you expose for the foreground, the sky blows out.
GND's help your camera by letting you darken the area you want. In the field, I use SinghRay Galen Rowell filters. This scene was more uniformly lit and I didn't really need one. But as I worked on it in LR, I felt it would enhance the shot.
Fortunately, LR let's us simulate the effect of glass GND's in software!
Okay, back to the screen. The small red circle is what turns on the GND effect. You click this and it lights up. The bigger red circled area shows up. This is the effect that the GND will have - however you set these sliders. In this case, I'm just looking for a slight darkening effect - or less exposure. So I crank this down a bit.
Then what you do is click where you want the effect to start, and drag to where you want the effect to end. So In my case I clicked top center, dragged down, and let it go where you see the dot. You can have multiple of them on the image, and they can each do something different. Only one is highlighted at a time, and is thus editable (this is the magic of LR vs PS, all effects can be continually tweaked).
See the little "light switch" where my blue circle is? This turns the effect on and off so you can easily see the difference.
In this example, just for fun of course, I reduced the exposure further, and added color (see the pink rectangle?). Just to show you some possibilities. And the best part is, LR never touches your original. All the adjustments are stored in a separate tiny text file. When you view an image in LR, it applies the adjustments. And you can go back and play with them, delete them, whatever.
Hope this helps!
