Skye Boatyard 2
Hi all,
It’s been a filthy couple of days outside due to a Tropical Low/cyclone which has been wandering around the Coral Sea for the last week, trying to decide whether it will cross the coast or not!
Recently I upgraded from Lightroom 3 to LR 5, so, while the weather has been wet & wild, I have been going back over some of my files to see what difference it makes. Without going into too much boring detail, the upgrade was well worth it with some new tools such as the Radial Filter and a revamp of exsisting tools such as the Spot Removal giving you more options for tweaking your images.
One tool I have been impressed with is the Highlight Slider which is brilliant for retaining detail in skies which I was always struggling with especially when conditions were light o/cast skies. It is nearly like finding an extra two stops of dynamic range in your camera!
The Clarity slider has had a makeover as well and they seem to have put it on turbo so it needs to be used carefully unless you want mid-tone contrast to make your images look like they have a sandpaper texture applied.
I have previously posted about this Skye Boatyard, while having a look at some files I played with these two different viewpoints of the same scene.
For me, they really bring back the bleak & forlorn weather & scenery of that day!
Country Road Sunset
Hope everybody had a great Easter Break. Judging by the lack of activity here, you all found better things to do than turn your computer on. As for me, I was back at sea for the first time in nearly 2 years!
Yesterday. I had to travel to Townsville for a doctor’s appointment at which they gave me some better news than I was expecting. The down side was they kept me waiting for nearly 2hrs and I nearly missed the great light in this image.
I had scoped out this area on a quick drive through on the way up, but had little idea of the area and what the light angles were going to be around sunset. Hightailing it along the Flinders Highway I could see some really nice light on the peaks in Bowling Green Bay Nat. Park. Sun was sinking fast and there were some large black clouds hovering along the western horizon.
Taking a chance, I ducked down a side road hoping I could find somewhere to take advantage of these conditions when this bent -up windmill appeared. I managed to fire of a 5 image stitch and a couple of single frames before the light disappeared. Whew!
Sometimes you just gotta take what you get and hope it works!
I think I just got away with it this time.
Looked like it would be a good sunset so I hung around for a while and then figured that it was a dud and started on the 3hr drive home. Looked into the rearvision mirror to see the lowering clouds lit from below beautifully, but by then I was in the wrong place heading in the wrong direction. Oh well, next time!
Old Hayshed
This is one from the last time I was in Tasmania. As I mentioned in a previous post, I drive past this hayshed regularly and it has always caught my eye. Conditions were pretty good this day so I stopped and took a few shots.
I like the recycled corrugated iron which gives it some character and the horse was a bonus. He even looks slightly guilty in this image!
From Chaos comes Order!
This is the first shot taken on the same afternoon as my previous post. I love the contrast between the seeming order of the sand ripples in the foreground and the chaos in the clouds above. Kind of a metaphor for life, the universe and everything. Our very orderly solar system was created from chaos, the sand ripples were created by the chaos of the waves which in turn were created by the wind which is reflected by the chaotic clouds.
Anyway, I hope you like it!
It ain’t over ’til the Fat Lady Sings!
I went up to Dingo Beach the other afternoon to get a range of images so I could test out a Plug-in for Lightroom by the name of L/R Enfuse. The plug-in is an HDR plug-in put together by Timothy Armes and is available from The Photographers Toolbox. I have never been a big fan of HDR as a lot of images look a little weird to me but that is just a personal taste.
So far the results look pretty good and I will be playing with it for a while to get the best out of it. Here is one of the images I came back with.
This shot nearly didn’t happen! I had been taking a range of images with a fairly un-inspiring sky. I wasn’t particularly worried as It was more about the process rather than the image this time. The sun had set and I waited for a while just in case. Judging that nothing was going to happen, I was in the process of packing up my gear when I looked up and noticed that a bit of colour was appearing in the clouds. Setting up my gear again I managed to get a couple of very nice images over the next 10 minutes.and it all faded as quickly as it had appeared!
The title of this post says it all!
Morning Glory
This is a monochrome rendering of a similar shot to my last post. The light rays are a little more defined in this one!
This is the image straight out of the camera.
All processing was done in Lightroom 3. Crop & Straighten,WB adjustment, B&W conversion, Graduated Filter, Beef up contrast, Split toning.
If anybody has ideas on a way to improve it, comments are most welcome as I am sure it can be improved upon!
I love this type of light!
I Have Seen the Light(room)!
Over the last week or so I have been testing a trial version of Adobe Lightroom 3 and so far I am quite impressed!
Adobe have tinkered under the bonnet quite a bit and revamped the processing engine as well as many other things which I haven’t even got to yet.
Essentially there is better sharpening and a far more flexible noise reduction which makes for smoother tonal gradations and colour rendition. When you put files through the new process which is a one step process, the detail that comes out is quite astonishing. In fact I am re-appraising a couple of older lenses that I hadn’t used in ages. The lenses are not as bad as I had thought which is just as well as my 24-105L has developed a problem!
The down side is that after converting all my panoramic source files, I will now need to go and restitch them all as the difference in quality is like chalk and cheese.
The other nice thing is the import dialogue which is much more user friendly especially if you need to move files around. There is also a neat little export dialogue that allows you to publish images to Flickr or Facebook very easily.
I think I will be buying this at the end of the trial period and it will be money well spent (US$100)
It appears that Jamie Patterson and Andrew Brown will be heading my way sometime next year so here is an image shot on the shore of the famous Hill Inlet to keep them inspired!
Island Images Photo Blog 