photo 04 Dec 2006 08:54 pm
Madison over Monona
From my Flickr comment:
I tried a number of different approaches to the post work. I wanted the skyline to have a little more definition than the raw files did. It was a misty morning and the camera didn’t pick up much detail. I also wanted the near shore to have the same feeling it did when I was standing there, and I think this recreates that feeling.
I’ve been really getting into learning about various post processing techniques lately. I try to use them judiciously. One of the first things I tried was black and white. It worked, but not that well. The lake lost some of the eerie quality in monochrome. Once I decided to do color, I tried some various thing. It was apparent early on that the top and bottom would be processed differently, so I put them on their own layers. The tough part was getting the skyline to pop a little more without making it gaudy or too obvious. I tried burning it a little, and adjusting the contrast, but it was hard to do that without affecting the water too. Eventually I came up with a combination of two or three techniques (I believe it was curves, some midtone burning, and creative sharpening) that, paired with the proper blending mode, achieved the effect I wanted.
The water at the bottom was pretty striaghtforward. I did a feathered selection and put it on its own layer. I used selective color to get it the way I wanted, did some sharpening, and blended it in. I’m pretty pleased with the result.
In other news, I’ve been thinking of buying a new camera. I was out taking pictures at the Devotchka show when the biggest shortfall of my Rebel 300D (the first digital rebel) was glaring me in the face: you can only take 4 pictures in a row before you have to wait. At concerts and sporting events, this is a problem. Things happen spontaneously and if you’re sitting there waiting for your camera to clear its buffer and write to a flash card, you’re missing photo opportunities. There were a number of times at the show where this happened to me, and it happens at roller derby matches too.
I’ve decided on the Rebel XTi. It’s spec’d to take 10 shots in a row, although I played with one at a store and fired off 11 without a pause. Digital Photography Review has the continuous firing scoop. It also has the option to show an RGB histogram rather than a brightness one. This would’ve also been great at the show. The lighting in there is so skewed to certain colors that an average brightness histogram just doesn’t cut it. Most often, red will be completely blown out while green and blue will be much better. With an RGB histogram, it’d be easier to notice problems like that.
So I’m probably gonna grab it from Dell. There’s a deal if you buy it from Dell home, and you can find stackable coupons on eBay that make it about 25% off altogether.
UPDATE: I wrote this post this morning but Blogger was broken all day long. Urgh. I did buy the camera! I got it from Dell for $611 before tax and shipping. Heck yeah