A Touch of Colour

I often remark to Nikhil that he should start a collection called “A Touch of Colour”, or in his case “A Touch of Red”.  He usually finds these scenes where there is one item of colour, usually red, that stands out in his compositions 🙂

While processing these two images I remembered what I so frequently tell him and decided to title this blog-post with this same concept.

The first image is an image that has been selectively desaturated to emphasize the Red, the processing is unusual for me but I rather liked how it turned out this time.

 

Red Cap - selective desaturation

The second image was not treated in the same way, it was of some gaily coloured flowers against an old almost colourless background, I went close with my zoom lens and worked to get some nice bokeh from the background.

 

Cat-tails

Pony Ride

As I am going through some of the photos from last year I am finding images I like and never processed.  This one was not the sharpest of the batch, but I liked the overall “feel”, the DoF and the smile on my daughter’s face  🙂

 

Pony Ride

The Branching Tree

OK, most trees branch, I know.  But I had a difficult time coming up with a title for the photo, and this one seemed appropriate somehow.

This is a tree on the northern side of The National Park, towards the Carifesta Avenue side.  It possibly fell and continued to grow, growing across the waterway and then branching upwards and out.  It creates a nice shady area, on this overcast day, there was very little light under the tree’s canopy, and I thought that an HDR would be a nice idea, I didn’t have my tripod with me, so I had to hand-hold the camera for the exposures.  The re-alignment didn’t come out spot-on, but it has a softness to the image that I liked.

I’ve had this one since last September to process and finally got around to it, I did no pre-processing in Lightroom, simply carried it into HDR Efex Pro and did the merging there, then a slight crop and rotate in Lightroom, then some saturation shifts and clarity adjustments to finish it off.

It is not a spectacular HDR, but it was geared towards revealing more detail in a very gloomy area  🙂

 

The Branching Tree
The Branching Tree: 3 image HDR

The Deck – Week 49

This week sees a continuation of the monochromatic trend of late, but instead of just a straight BW, I went for a sepia with a vignette.  It was on one of those walks with Nikhil, while looking for his Photo for his 365, and even though these waterways have been done, and over-done, I thought I’d give it a try, with the over-cast sky and perpetuating gloom of the afternoon this was pre-destined to be a monochromatic photograph.

After minimal processing in Lightroom, I did the monochromatic rendition in Nik Silver Efex, it came out rather nicely.

 

Yonder Bridge

The Deck – Week 48

I am pretty much disappointed with this week’s photographs, I have one of my wife that I thought was a great shot and was very tempted to put as the photo for this week’s Deck entry, but she would never forgive me if I did, so I had to settle for this one.

I intentionally took multiple exposures most of this week because I intended to do some more HDR attempts, but this one didn’t come out as expected.  For some reason my alignment was all wrong and there’s quite a bit of haloing as a result.  I did intend a BW HDR, so this I used as much to my advantage as possible.

I did the HDR merging in Nik HDR Efex Pro, and also added a vignette to it there. The final touches were added in Lightroom using a BW POP preset I got from Eric Kim, who does really great Street Photography, I hope he doesn’t mind that I used it for something other that Street Photography  🙂

I rather liked the lone tree and it’s reflection, so that’s why this was my choice this week.

Casting a Reflection - BW HDR

The Deck – Week 45

There’s an old Koker (or sluice) on Camp Road outside of the Guyana Technical Institute that I have been keeping an eye on for months, I always want to stop and photograph it, but most times there are some homeless men or just loafers around it, then at other times, the scene just wasn’t appealing to me.  I was accompanying Nikhil as he headed up to David Street to photograph a scene his wife had pointed out to him when I noticed the lighting and the overall scene and asked him to stop so that I could get it at least this once.

I was a bit pressed for time this week, I haven’t processed any of my other images for the week, I took the easy route and did some minor “light” editing in Oloneo for this week’s image.

 

Camp Road Koker - 1/125s f/8.0 ISO200 10mm

 

 

The Deck – Week 43

Oloneo just extended their current Beta version of their software to December, and I remembered that I had wanted to experiment with a single image in their software and see what lighting possibilities there were, so this week I chose a photograph that I had wanted to do some minor lighting adjustments and colour saturations to.  As Oloneo can work directly with the RAW file I actually got quite a lot of noise in the process, and I then used some noise reduction before uploading.

As a stand-alone RAW processor it is not bad at all, nowhere close to Lightroom, but then nothing is.  I like the slider controls and I would recommend it for HDR work, and if you like experimenting, it has a unique “Relighting” HDR feature, for controlled shooting conditions, check out their site if you get the chance.

I only took 86 photos this week, but for the small number I had a slightly hard time choosing one, I think it is just because of my experimenting in Oloneo that I chose this one  🙂

This was taken at Diamond (village) on the East Bank of Demerara, the cane fields are in bloom, the sun was about to go into its daily descent for sunset and some of the clouds were reflecting the sun’s glow nicely.  Oloneo stripped out the EXIF information from the file, I hope they fix that in the final version.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

 

Diamond Fields 7505. Canon T1i, 1/40sec f/4.5 ISO200 10mm

 

 

The Deck – Week 42

I almost didn’t get to sort out this last week’s photos, and I may have already used my best image for that last post  🙂

This week’s image has a little novelty, a small moon in the background.  While this week’s image may not be too special, today is special for myself and Nikhil, we were both chosen as “Featured Local Photographers” for an event being held by the Demerara Tobacco Company as part of the Dunhill Experience, so a few of our images will be on display at a semi-private event and we are expected to be there to discuss our photography with the guests.  This is a first for me, my fifteen minutes of fame (or shame, if I can’t put two words together correctly).  Wish me luck, I am not too worried about my friend Nikhil, he’s a lawyer, he’s faced worse people  🙂  I think that they will feature other photographers at later events, so we’re like the opening act  🙂

Anyway, here’s the photo of the Susamacher Methodist Church  🙂

Late Afternoon @ Better Hope

Recently I have taken to “not” reviewing my images until Friday morning, when I would choose my photograph for the 2010 Deck collection on the main site.  But this week I broke from the norm to attempt another HDR (High Dynamic Range) image.  I went with Nikhil out to get his daily photograph, and we turned down the dividing road between the villages of Better Hope and Vryheid’s Lust, I wasn’t much inspired by the things I saw, but the sky was very nice, and I thought that a wide-angle HDR would turn out nicely.  I had also just downloaded my trial version of Nik HDR Efex Pro and I wanted to try it out.

I have blogged about how I normally process my HDR images before, so this post is more about showing the results of trying the new software from Nik.  I was impressed with the similarity it has to the other Nik software I’ve tried (like the Nik SIlver Efex) and it is easy and intuitive to use.  I did not try to learn too much on this first try, just played with the basic settings to see how it stacked up against Dynamic HDR from Mediachance.

I think the resulting image speaks for itself, both Nik HDR Efex Pro and Dynamic HDR were able to help me to portray the variety of tones that I saw, in this case I was facing the slate afternoon sun, so the image has a lot more detail than a standard shot of the sky which rendered the buildings in the foreground as mostly silhouettes.

Take a look and let me know what you think  🙂  If you click on the image the site has it a bit larger.

 

 

3 Image HDR, processed using Nik HDR Efex Pro

 

September Monochromes

I decided on the name before I realised that I have one that was actually taken in October, but since I am unable to come up with a new creative sounding name, it remains as September Monochromes.

I want to start off with a Sepia image, it’s not necessarily a great image, but I liked the elements; seashore, people – young and not-so-young, and a fishing rod.

 

Afternoon After-school

 

The next is the first of the Black and White images, it is one that I recently entered into a DP Review challenge called Clouds, I was experimenting with a borrowed Canon 80-200mm lens and most of the images came out very low contrast, so like the Sepia one above, most of the rest I’ve rendered in monochrome.  This one came out much better than expected, I had to give it a title for the challenge, so that’s how the title came to be.

 

Sail-winds and Silhouettes
Sail-winds and Silhouettes

 

Along the seashore, you are sure to find a coconut washed ashore by the waves, this one was partway up a concrete sloped walkway on the seawall, maybe washed there but probably kicked there by some youngster.

 

Coconut
Coconut

 

The final image is the one taken in October, after our Robbery ordeal and we daringly went right back to the Kingston Promenade, I like the clouds in the sky and thought that the lighthouse silhouetted against it would look nice  🙂

They were doing some renovation work to the lighthouse, so you might notice the scaffolding on the sides of it there.