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)
1 comment:
This is so cool with the chainlink fence in the foreground! I wouldn't have thought to do this, and your result is inspiring. Thanks for your notes about your self-learning in processing. Very helpful and interesting.
Post a Comment