April, week one:
There's a great little crêperie in downtown Charlottesville, in a tiny little brick building. You just walk up to the little window, get your food, and eat it on the patio out front. Unfortunately they are closed on Monday's so I couldn't get a crêpe but i was able to get some cool pictures. Making use of my handy-dandy tripod, I was able to get some extended-exposure shots with cars driving by leaving streaks of their lights. A trick I learned is that you often get a better effect if you can time it so that you only have cars driving away from you... the red tail-lights don't over-expose as easily as headlights do, and you get the added advantage of their headlights illuminating some of the subject. That worked well here. This image addresses a large number of my goals for this project... more than any other single image to date (although admittedly "action" is questionable).
The black and white conversion process wasn't very complicated, although because of the detail I wanted in the bricks I did a little bit more sharpening after resizing than I normally do (USM with 200% instead of 150%, still at 0.5 pixels). Also, since the image was slightly under-exposed, the total percentage for the various channels in channel mixer added up to 110%, followed by a slight boost to brightness and contrast. Doing this in post-processing, as opposed to getting full exposure with the original image, kept the street-lamps from being too blown-out. Lastly, I toyed around with an asymmetric border... I hadn't ever tried this before, but I really like the way it turned out. I need to experiment with this more to try and maximize the impact the borders can have.
Image details:
Date and location: 4/2/7 at 20:47 EDT, downtown, Charlottesville, VA
Equipment: Canon 30D, 17-85mm IS lens, Hoya SMC UV filter
Settings: 28mm, tripod, ISO 100, f/4.5, 5.0 sec, (pattern metering ; - 1.0 EV) shot in raw
Processing: raw conversion in Aperture v1.5.2, export as .jpg -> photoshop -> USM (200%, 0.5, 0) -> monochrome channel mixer (50, 50, 10, 0) -> crop -> resize -> USM (200%, 0.5, 0) -> brightness +10 & contrast +20 -> border + text -> save for web
Photo-a-week goals addressed: #1 (b+w), #6 (extended exposure), #7 (night photography), #9 (action), #11 (architecture), #16 (street photography)
1 comment:
I think you did a fine job!
I just wrote you a much longer comment, but Blogger wouldn't accept my password and then when it finally did, the comment disappeared :-( I hope you might consider changing the comment alternatives to make it easier. But I love the shot and enjoyed reading your text!
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