dendritic...

April, week two:
There was a thunderstorm that started less than an hour after the "night photography" challenge started on DPChallenge. I went on to my balcony and tried to start taking some shots. It was hard to time it right, and out of a few dozen images only two or three turned out decent. This is my favorite. I learned a lot about timing lightning strikes, and am looking forward to future opportunities. Unfortunately, since I was in my apartment complex, the lights in the parking lot didn't allow the dark background that I needed to do very long exposures and still have decent contrast. The longest exposure I could get in this setting without the background looking too bright was about 2 seconds... so, most images had no lightning. Here's one that showed some of the nice dendritic branching that I was hoping to capture. I wish there were more lightning storms around here.

For the processing, after a simple b+w conversion I adjusted the levels to darken the sky a little. Resizing, sharpening, and then I went with the asymmetric (top/bottom) border again... this time to compensate for the wide crop ratio that I was forced to use.

Image details:
Date and location: 4/4/7 at 01:01 EDT, my balcony, Charlottesville, VA
Equipment: Canon 30D, 17-85mm IS lens, Hoya SMC UV filter
Settings: 17mm, tripod, ISO 100, f/4.0, 2.0 sec, shot in raw
Processing: cataloged in Aperture v1.5.2 -> export as tif to PS7 -> monochrome mixer (0, 100, 0, 0), -> crop -> levels (0-222) -> resize -> USM (300%, 0.5, 0) -> border + text ->save as .jpg
Photo-a-week goals addressed: #1 (b+w), #6 (extended exposure), #7 (night photography), #10 (landscapes)

streak of light...

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)