Saturday, February 3, 2007

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)

5 comments:

Unknown said...

I love faded brick ads! They are such a part of history that is overlooked. You could do a whole series of these from all over the country.

Obsidian said...

Coke really is it in this photo - great capture.

Terra Photography said...

I enjoyed this image (I'm a Coca~Cola fan myself!). I also liked the stark white of the window frames. Adds a bit of contrast between the old (faded) and new (bright).

puzzled p said...

Ah, you find the best old buildings! I haven't tried Aperture, but have been curious about it - was good to read your take on it. I like this shot a lot.

kaye said...

I love these old advertisements on buildings. There are a lot in the area where I'm from, and it's a nice distraction to look at them while I'm stuck at a traffic light! The processing you did to pull out the ad is wonderful!