dirty caterpillar...

February, week four:
A significantly different photo from last week... I will admit that I was a little desperate for a submission since today is the last day of february. I took this at the construction site next to where I am working tonight. Once completed, this building will house the University of Virginia Department of Radiology research space. I like the depth of field effect on the fence (I also took a companion photo focused on the fence, with the construction equipment out of focus). Until now, I had addressed 8 of the 15 stated goals for my project (several of them more than once, of course), and thought this may be a good way to address "industrial" (although it's not the first thing that comes to mind when I think of industrial photography). Hopefully by the end of March I will check off a few more from the list.

Something I did with this photo, which I recently figured out when reading photographer notes on dpchallenge.com (especially the very helpful info by scalvert), was to resize in the middle of processing. I realized that I was spending so much time trying to tweak the contrast and sharpness of a photo, and then just hit "save for web" and submitted. Only after thinking about it did the obvious become even more obvious... I need to spend my time working on the image that is being submitted, not just on the full resolution image! So, after some minor initial sharpening, I resized and did another round of sharpening, and the results really stood out. While I could have improved upon this image some more, the more important thing was the immediate understanding of why many of my images have appeared soft in their final form. For this image, the second sharpening really brought out the detail on the dirt...

I'm getting more comfortable with the channel mixer for black and white conversion, so I will need to start learning more about hue & saturation methods of converting. Then, hopefully within a few weeks, Photoshop CS3 will be out (I'm using a really old version right now, clearly not optimized for my macbook) and will play with its new features. But I want to learn the basics before I try and let a fancy piece of software take all the fun out of the process.

Image details:
Date and location: 2/28/7 at 17:10 EST, Charlottesville, VA
Equipment: Canon 30D, 17-85mm IS lens, Hoya SMC UV filter
Settings: 41mm, handheld with IS, ISO 100, f/8.0, 1/100 sec, shot in raw
Processing: raw conversion in Aperture v1.5.2, export as .jpg and load into photoshop 7, channel mixer/monochrome (50, 0, 35, -10), USM (150%, 1.0, 0) -> resize -> USM (100%, 1.0, 0) -> +10 contrast -> border, text, save
Photo-a-week goals addressed: #1 (b+w), #14 (industrial)

bug eyed...

February, week three:
I'm visiting my brother in Augusta where my parents are coming to celebrate their 40th anniversary. My visit, and that of my other brother, was a surprise to my parents. While waiting for my parents to arrive, I spent some time playing with my niece and nephew. Here my nephew is excited to have his picture taken... he is only 8 months old, but this morning he climbed out of his crib on his own for the first time. Looks like my sister-in-law and brother will have their hands full keeping track of him. I have taken nearly 150 pictures in less than a day here, and will likely take many more as the weekend goes on.

I don't have a lot of experience taking pictures of people, in particular in black and white, so i like how this turned out. I wish I had a faster lens so I wouldn't have to use a flash. The conversion on this was fairly straight forward, and I'm excited about how powerful Aperture is. I have about 12 days left in my trial, and will likely be purchasing the full version at that time.

Image details:
Date and location: 2/17/7 at 19:23 EST, my brother's house, Augusta, GA
Equipment: Canon 30D, 17-85mm IS lens, Hoya SMC UV filter
Settings: 22mm, handheld with IS, flash, ISO 100, f/4.0, 1/60 sec, shot in raw
Processing: raw conversion in Aperture v1.5.2, monochrome mixer (0, 100, 0), sharpen 1.0, brightness 0.25, contrast 0.10, to photoshop, resize to 768 pixels, border + text, save as .jpg
Photo-a-week goals addressed: #1 (b+w), #2 (portraits), #3 (vertical orientation)

stone wall...

February, week two:
While driving around on some country roads just at about sunset, i noticed that the light was nearly parallel to a stone bridge that led to Monticello. Even while driving I could see the amazing contrast that this offered, and I had to park on the side of the road and quickly get some pictures. Within just a few minutes the sun had shifted enough that there was no longer any light, but in that time I got some great shots that I really like.

I have completed my transition to Aperture for management of my library, and for this image actually chose to do all of the post-processing (other than the initial raw conversion) in photoshop (still on v7). While I like aperture, photoshop offers much more flexibility. In addition to regular sharpening, there is also USM (both sharpening features are more customizable). I liked the ability to sharpen both before and after resizing (which I guess could be done in Aperture, but not as easily). This is something I hadn't thought much about, but it makes sense that the resizing (in this case downsizing to 1024 pixels) will alter the sharpness and other image parameters. I need to start doing fine-tuning at the final output resolution.

This could have turned out a little better, with more intrinsic sharpness and contrast, if I had used a tripod, which I may do on a reshoot. Regardless, I am very happy with this image. There is a balance between creating crisp sharp images as opposed to harsh-appearing oversharpened images. While I think this would look better if more of the sharpness was natural and not created in photoshop, I have no complaints. Every week I suggest that if I went back I could take a better version of the image, and I plan on re-shooting nearly all of these images. I think this is a good demonstration of how post-processing can improve an image, but can only go so far in compensating for limitations in the initial capture. Hopefully I will better anticipate the things i need to do to improve the pictures, and maybe I will soon have images that i can enjoy without thinking about re-shooting.

Image details:
Date and location: 2/4/7 at 16:17 EST, Saunders Bridge at Monticello, Charlottesville, VA
Equipment: Canon 30D, 17-85mm IS lens, Hoya SMC UV filter
Settings: 70mm, handheld with IS, ISO 100, f/8.0, 1/125 sec, shot in raw
Processing: cataloged in Aperture v1.5.2, monochrome channel mixer in photoshop (10, 10, 100, 0), USM 200, 1.0, 0, resize to 1024 pixels, USM 100, 1.0, 0, +10 contrast, border + text, save as .jpg
Photo-a-week goals addressed: #1 (b+w), #12 (abstract)

coke wall...

February, week one:
I was walking downtown this afternoon with some friends and noticed this wall with a faded coca-cola advertisement. This fascinated me for several reasons. First, I love coke (although I switched to diet-coke a few years ago) and coke advertisements. More than anything, though, was that I had never noticed this despite walking past it dozens of times over the last year and a half. The afternoon lighting was on the opposite side of the street, but I like the way this turned out... especially since it was very faded to begin with.

Last week I made a switch to managing my photos in Aperture, which is much more powerful than iphoto. I'm not as familiar with aperture as I was with lightroom, so I wanted to play around with it some. While I had the option of doing the black and white conversion in photoshop, as I have been doing previously, I decided to make the adjustments in aperture. The controls aren't as flexible as photoshop, but I like the way this turned out. I had to use Imagewell, a simple but useful freeware program, to add the border and watermark. Hopefully I will learn how to do more functions directly within Aperture. Together with photoshop CS3 (should be out in a few months), I will hopefully have all the necessary tools to create some great images.

So my last few entries have been architectural in nature, along with a junk/nostalgic theme... I'll look to shake things up next week, as there are a bunch of my goals that I haven't addressed yet. Also, to avoid there being "week 28" entries, or other numbers like that, I've started numbering as "Month, week X." I will attempt to do 5 entries in at least four months, giving me 52 for the year.

Image details:
Date and location: 2/3/7 at 15:51 EST, Downtown Mall, Charlottesville, VA
Equipment: Canon 30D, 17-85mm IS lens, Hoya SMC UV filter
Settings: 17mm, handheld with IS, ISO 100, f/5.6, 1/60 sec, shot in raw
Processing: to monochrome in Aperture v1.5.2 (-20, 27, 100), sharpen 0.60, export as jpg and then border+watermark in Imagewell v3.0.1
Photo-a-week goals addressed: #1 (b+w), #11 (architecture), #15 (nostalgia)