Winter Time at Nathan Phillips Square

Trying to make sure that I have at least one post in the past year or so.  In honour of it being the warmest day of the year, I thought I'd post a winter throwback picture taken back in December.

This was actually a bit of a throwaway image.  I had just finished a night walk with some others from a local photowalk group and we had finished up at City Hall.  Someone asked me to watch his gear while he went to use the little boys room and so I plopped my tripod down and starting fooling around with the shutter settings while waiting to see if I might get a handle on what would work.  As a result, I ended up with the following image.

Original

I liked the composition of the moving skaters and the people sitting down who are frozen and of course the arches overhead with the stars hanging down.  The problem with the image is that it's misbalanced and there's a lot of distracting elements.  So I ended up cropping out the left hand side to remove the building and the garbage receptacle.

Cropped

A little better. One thing I didn't like was the second person from the right was moving at the time of the image which caused her to blur a bit.  I thought of trying to sharpen her up and define her edges a bit more to make her look more static-y, but I still think the image is a bit lopsided.  With the guys sitting on the bench, I thought it would look a bit better if there was only one person on either side of them so I ended up just removing her completely.  I then adjusted the orientation a bit.  I gave some thought to trying to paint the lights into the second arch, which weren't working on that day, but it started to look a bit unnatural so I let it be.  I did paint in a bit of the light which were missing in the first arch on the right hand side of the image.

Final Image

If I had to do it again, I would have repositioned the camera a bit to the right.  The stars are lopsidded because of the parallax angle which would have allowed a much more symmetrical image.  Looking back through the images I took after this, it appears that I did try to reposition the camera, but the shutter speeds were too long and the skaters were too much of a blur.   This was a 2 second exposure so it worked okay.

Gazebo

Yes, I had the best of intentions to fill this blog with pics of my amateur attempts of using Photoshop, but alas like my running blog, not quite so much.  I haven't really used my camera that much and certainly not enough to generate pictures that I could actually do work on, so nothing really much else to post.  I did subscribe to the newest version of Photoshop/Lightroom so I best try and get my money's worth.

So here is an interesting image.  Was taken on the Toronto island along the boardwalk on the south side of the island.  The boardwalk backs onto several residences, one of which had this cool gazebo.  With the late afternoon sun poking through the trees, I thought a sunburst type image in HDR might make an interesting shot.  Though I had a tripod with me, I shot this hand held bracketed 3 images at +/-2EV. Unfortunately, when I got home and looked at the images, the bracketing didn't seem that great as I had these three lacklauster images to work with.

I could still work with it though. The underexposed image would give me the sky, the normal image would give me the sunburst and the overexposed image would give me basically everything else.

Loaded the images into Photomatix and chose one of the painterly presets and ended up with the following image.

 

Interesting, but a couple of issues.  The green flare right in the middle looks horrible which also appears to have caused the trim on the gazebo to turn moldy green.   The sky also looks a little fake. There wasn't enough info in the normal and underexposed images to try and recover whatever was under the flare easily so I ended up having to clone the parts where the flare showed up and I ended up repainting the colour of the wood trim on the gazebo.  Took me a long time to do it. I also tried to even out the colour of the sky, but wasn't too happy with the result. I ended up cropping the image to make it less distracting.  The final image.

Still not too happy about some of the flare, but I already spent so much time on it fixing the one flare in the middle, I just called it a day.

Flowers

An easy one, using only Lightroom. I often try to get images with the sun in the frame.  Maybe, it's a result of liking the new star trek movies that have a bit too much lens flare in them.  Something about the sun shining down on things that makes an image just better. Anyhow, here is a very bland looking shot obtained straight from camera. 

 

Several issues with the image. Seems a bit dark and dull, the pole with the street sign is distracting and the wires just look ugly. So immediate thought is to try and focus in on only the flowers and the sun and to crop out the pole and sign.  Had to fix the levels and colour a bit to bring out the colour in  sky.  Masked the flowers and really tried to increase the redness and brightness in the flowers and then used the spot removal tool to try remove the wires.  Annoying to do with Lightroom 4, but apparently easier to do in Lightroom 5 since they added a brush tool to paint in fixes. The final result.

Though happy with the result, I still see some issues.  The two wire at the top right hand corner could have been removed, but at the time I did it, I thought it would look a little more legitimate if it was imperfect. Also in playing with the levels, I brought out some detail in the house which just looks incorrect.  At that angle, the house should be completely dark.  The white trim in the roof triangle is okay, but the white window frame below and the area surrounding it is distracting.  

Hello World

I thought I would start up a new blog with another passion of mine which is photography. This isn't so much a blog of images I've taken which you can see by visiting my Flickr page, but rather my way at trying to document my attempts at getting better at post processing, or put another way, at photoshopping.  I have lots of mediocre images that may or may not get better with post processing, but I've never really set out to try and considering I have several year old copy of photoshop which I've barely used, I guess I should try and get my money's worth. I'm an amateur by all measures so don't expect anything mindblowing.  Welcome to my world!