Saint Stephens#3

One cool late  afternoon in December of last year (2011) I took a walk around Harrisburg PA with camera in hand and pack on my back. One of my first stops was along front street with the Susquehanna river and the sun to my back. In front of me was Saint Stephens Episcopal Cathedral. The sun gave some warmth to the walls and the trees growing along Front street provided the shadows. I thought it might make a nice picture; not great, but I knew I could work with it.

After taking a few shots from several different perspectives I shuffled down the street keeping my eyes open for the next possibility. One I got home and found time to review my photos, the ones from Saint Stephens seemed a bit lack luster. Part of this was my exposure setting, not having my camera stopped down enough, made this series of photos dull and uninviting. (See pic#1 below)

Fortunately I shoot in RAW format which I recommend to just about everyone who will listen. Shooting in jpg format doesn’t provide the same opportunity to salvage a an almost-there photo as does the RAW format.  I use Adobe’s Lightroom 3, my software of choice for editing photos in RAW format. I won’t post every step that I did in Lightroom, however I can tell you one of the first things I do is increasing the blacks using the provided slider. How much to increase it is a personal preference choice. Let’s just say “Till it looks good.”  In addition to bumping up the blacks I most often open the brush icon to dodge and burn areas in the photo. Again, I do this until it looks good; well, to me anyway. (See pic#2 below)

I felt the second photo was indeed an improvement over the first but it still seems just a bit ho-hum. Sometimes that happens and there’s not much you can do but to move on to the next photo and work on it. However in my case I recently upgraded my onOne Perfect Suite 5 photo editing software to onOne Perfect Suite version 6 and I was eager to try it out. This is not a detailed review of On One’s software nor will I provide every step I took while using Perfect Suite 6: that will come in other postings. So I hope this time out it will suffice to say I added several textures. Perfect Suite 6 is loaded with presets for all kinds of textures and lighting option (it also offers much more) and after choosing a preset I would tweak it using the built in sliders to get the look I was after before moving onto the next preset that intrigued me. This was a trial an error process and a whole lot of fun. The first picture you see in this post is the result.

Knowing that this has not been a very detailed posting please feel free to ask your questions in the comments section: I will do my best to answer them.

This past May, as I traveled to visit and photograph several National Parks I stopped in Holbrook Arizona to visit my friend Steve. My first evening there had Steve busy but he was sure to tell me where to set up my camera to get some great open shots of a south western sunset. I was there in plenty of time since it was about 200 yards from the where I would be sleeping for the next two night. My equipment was lite: two camera’s (Nikon D300s & Nikon D-90) and a flip video I had attached to a gorilla pod which I attached to a fence post. I started the video which happily recorded a glorious sunset, which I am sure Steve ordered just for me. On my D300s I mounted my 18-55mm kit lens because I wasn’t happy with my initial shots using my 50mm prime. The slower lens gave me better results. On the D-90 I had a 55-300mm lens that I ended up ignoring for most of the evening. Taking a few shots to get the shutter speed and aperture set where I wanted them I jumped ,in first with more traditional shots of sunsets with wide open horizons. Then when it became dark enough for the feel and effect I was after I began taking pictures for the series I call “Sunset Winds”. I took over two hundred photos of the sunset that evening with about 50 of them using a long exposure technique I have been working on for a while.  It was this technique that gave me the Sunset Winds. This particular photo was a .5sec exposure at F36. My goal was to keep a horizon visible and yet reflect movement in the sunset. I have titled this series of photos “Sunset Winds”. You can find this series in my Gallery.

These pianos would split apart as they were pushed off the back of trucks generating loud resonating sounds and exposing parts to pianos I had never seen. The trucks came and went with gaps of time between deliveries which I put to good use with my camera. I took close to 400 pictures that day; the majority of which I will keep. The percentage of good to bad photos for this serendipitous photo shoot was definitely to my favor.

When I began to edit these pictures I found many that naturally seemed to call for a square cropping rather than the usual rectangle. It is these square pictures I have posted in a gallery titled Musical Squares. I hope you enjoy them.

If you don’t know, they stay green all year, even through Pennsylvania winters which is where I live. I had a few already planted. also given to me by my friend, that were an encouragement to me as they reach up beyond the snow letting me know not everything is dead or in hibernation. Well back to my going outside when I thought it was too cold to go outside. First I found the fresh air invigorating, then the work of digging the needed holes, warming, and the completion of the job satisfying to no end. It was like getting the jump on spring. so I also planted onions, which should have been done a couple of weeks ago. And that felt good too. Now I am looking around for the next thing. I have a lot of next things and they may finaly get done.

The main point of all this is for me to encourage you to go outside. Take a walk if you have no gardens to work in or donated plants to plant. but by all means go out!