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

"Bridge"

Lots of interesting lines and angles in this 70-year-old wooden truss bridge spanning the Little Bouctouche River in New Brunswick. An extremely wide-angle lens (12mm) allowed me to stand on the bridge and still fit much of the structure within the frame.

But a wide-angle lens creates significant perspective distortions. Notice the odd angles of the upper cross-beams in the "before" image. I could have avoided this by standing right in the middle of the bridge and pointing the camera straight down the center, but I thought that would have made for a boring composition.


I twisted the image until the cross-beams appeared horizontal. This made it necessary to crop the image - so you see that the "after" image is much tighter to the bridge structure than the "before". The tighter crop makes the curve of the arches more dominant and leads the eye nicely into the frame.

The original image was underexposed and looked "flat". I made brightness and contras…
Post a Comment
Read more

"Blue House"

The French-Canadian village of Grand-Étang on the west coast of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia has a few brightly colored cedar-shingle houses that I have always found very striking. This one, with its electric blue walls and neat white trim, is a beautiful example.


My challenge was to make the house stand out from its surroundings. I wanted to eliminate distracting visual elements. I blurred the surrounding field and hills while leaving the house sharp. I cloned out the barn behind the house to the left, the two utility poles immediately next to it, and the chairs at the extreme right. But I kept the little storage hut because I liked the juxtaposition of the larger blue house against the smaller drab structure. 

I cropped the image a little to make the house more dominant. But I didn't crop too much because I wanted to maintain the feeling I had of the house in its landscape. 

I made some lighting and contrast adjustments in order to, among other things, make the shadows on the ho…
Post a Comment
Read more

"Red Dress"

Sometimes you have to be lucky.

There I am, in the trendy Hawthorne District of Portland, Oregon. Across the street is a stylish young couple waiting for the light to change. The hem of the woman's brilliant red dress is wafted up by a momentary breeze. The red of the dress just happens to be complemented by the red hand of the traffic light, and the red marquee of the 90-year-old Bagdad Theater, a Portland landmark. What are the odds?
First, I strengthen the position of the dress as the visual center of the image. That's easy: I crop. I want the red of the Bagdad marquee to frame the image at the top, and the yellow center line of the road to frame it at the bottom. I also want to leave enough in the frame to give you a sense of the street. And I don't want to lose too much of the lettering on the marquee. To get it right I change the aspect ratio to 4:3 from the original 3:2.


Now I want the couple to stand out even more. I darken and blur the part of the image immediately b…
Post a Comment
Read more