Skip to main content

"Sailboat"


A sailboat travels the Western Channel opposite the Toronto waterfront on a spring afternoon in 2008. I set my shutter speed to 1.6 seconds to blur the motion of the boat and pointed my wide-angle (24mm) lens slightly downward to fill the bottom two-thirds of the frame with water.

Working with wide-angle lenses is tricky where perspective distortion is concerned. Tilting the lens downward made the buildings in the background of the BEFORE image appear to lean away from the center of the frame. I straightened the image with a perspective correction. 

 Perspective corrections force you to crop - in this case, from the bottom and sides of the frame. (When setting up a shot that will require perspective correction, I frame the image with extra space to allow for cropping later.) 

 I wanted to brighten the water while preserving contrast between the very bright reflection of the boat and the darker surface of the water. It is usually the case in photoshop that there is more than one way to achieve any given result. Here, I decided to apply a "shadows/highlights" adjustment. Caution: the shadows/highlights tool has to be used with great care. I find many images that look obviously and unappealingly "photoshopped" get that appearance from heavy-handed application of shadows/highlights adjustments.

 The BEFORE image has a color cast - notice the magenta tones in the sky. I corrected this with a color temperature adjustment of the RAW file.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Boat Tour"

On a boat tour of Western Brook Pond in western Newfoundland two women focused on the spectacular scenery while I focused on them. The pastel colors of their windbreakers contrasted with each other and with the natural tones of the land, water and sky. The image tells a strong, simple story: two people awestruck by 600 meter (2000 foot) cliffs towering over a remote, pristine lake. This image required less work than many of the others featured in this blog. It's a good example of how even relatively modest adjustments can transform a photograph from merely "interesting" to "worthy of displaying". I wanted to separate the women from the landscape - make each part of the image stand out in its own right. I was taken by the colors and textures of the jackets so I increased vibrancy a little to bring out the color and used  fine-contrast and tone curve adjustments to  highlight the fabric's folds and shadows. I added drama to the background through t
Post a Comment
Read more

"Trepassey"

The isolated coastal village of Trepassey, Newfoundland sits in the southeast corner of Canada's eastern-most province. The vantage point of this photograph makes for a classic Newfoundland scene: a sliver of human settlement poised between sky and sea. Ethereal, other-worldly: I wanted to capture that feeling. Because I had pointed my camera slightly upward to get more sky in the frame, I had to correct the resulting perspective distortion - notice in the "before" image how the lines of reflected light closest to the sides of the image are twisted away from the center.  I fixed the color temperature to eliminate the strong bluish cast. I corrected the vignetting - notice how the "before" image is significantly darker at all four edges. I cropped from the bottom of the image to bring the bottom border closer to edge of the reflected lights. How do you convey "ethereal"? For me the key elements were delicacy,  l ightness, and a sense of &qu
Post a Comment
Read more

"Tablelands"

The tablelands of western Newfoundland are a rare geological formation - a piece of the earth's mantle, normally buried seven or more kilometers beneath the earth's crust, but forced to the surface here several hundred million years ago. The area lacks the usual nutrients required to sustain most plant life, and so is nearly barren. The high iron content of the rock accounts for the rusty brownish color. In the BEFORE image the sky is correctly exposed but everything else is badly underexposed. This was fixed with an exposure correction in the RAW image.  The BEOFRE image has a slightly bluish color cast which was fixed with a color temperature correction. After making those global adjustments, I worked separately on four sections of the image: the sky, the land in the upper part of the frame, the creek, and the large rock that dominates the lower right-hand corner.  The overall plan was to bring out the textures and contrast in the rocks, maintain the darker ton
Post a Comment
Read more