Hey Everyone!
I’ve been procrastinating like crazy on what to start with, so I thought I’d just post a few recent photos to “get the ball rolling”.
These are all examples of my work, after it has gone through the editing process – meaning Lightroom, Photoshop, Nik Software, as well as a few other tools I use depending on what I’m trying to create. Lately I’ve been using the Mogrify plug-in for Lightroom to make cool borders with my own personal watermark.
What I’m going to do, as an intro to this blog, is briefly describe what I did to get this photo to look the way it does. I don’t have the “raw”photos handy, and want to get this off quickly, so I’ll just show the post-processed photos for now. I hope this might get some of you pointed in the right direction – learning where to start with digital photography is often the hardest part!
(*NOTE – If any of this is confusing, I will go into more detail in future blogs on exactly what steps I use to get these images. This is meant to be a general overview on technique, not instruction)
Shhhhhhh ….. don’t tell anybody it’s not real! You can make a lens flare if you are artistic, or use some of Photoshop’s tools to make one, then use it as a layer to place it on top of your image.
My wife, son and I were on a trip recently to the Atlantic coast on the Florida/Georgia state border to photograph birds, and we ended up at this Civil War/Seminole War era fort (Fort Clinch). I was doing a little HDR work when this man in an old sergeant uniform walked up and said hello. My wife prompted me to ask him to pose, which he was very happy to. Now – how do I get this image to look so old?
First thing – use any sepia setting or preset, then darken the edges AND lighten the center. There are plenty of “film” presets that will also let you add grain to the photo to make it look aged. Last thing – lighten up all the shadows. You never see solid black in these old images.
This old mill in Central Florida was a great subject for a photograph. I wanted to do something very different with it – in the sense that many photographers see an old building and go “Wow! that’s just beautiful!”, then change it into something else with editing (often sepias or black&whites like the last image)
For this one, I wanted bright color! I pushed the saturation in the yellows, blues, and greens, and sharpened the whole image for lots of detail. I already had a lot because I used a tripod, but I needed all the detail I could get because I was going to blur the edges, which I did, for an odd sort of contrast. Vignette blur – then a traditional square vignette on top of it.
This guy was a classical guitarist I found on Craigslist.org who was looking for a photographer to provide some shots for a project he was working on. This was a simple edit. I blurred the edges and added a square vignette like the last photo, then used Photoshop to get rid of all the color except his guitar. Just a little contrast tweaking was needed to finish it off!
Back to Fort Clinch …. I had a blast with HDR phtography (High Dynamic Range). I spent quite a bit of time on this photo, but essentially this is five different images taken with a tripod, each at a different exposure. Then through digital imaging, I was able to combine them into one image eliminating all the bright highlights and dark shadows. Then I adjusted the hues, clarity, vibrancy, and with a little cropping, had this super-high resolution image of a very significant piece of history of my home state.
Cheers!
Rich.
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