"Northern Landscape"

It's amazing what a difference a crop can make. Yes, the BEFORE image needed more work than just a crop, but cropping was a critical step in transforming it from something with potential into a photograph worth looking at.

Fall colors come early in Canada's far north. This photo was shot in late August near Fort McPherson, Northwest Territories, about 100 km south of the Arctic Circle and also just south of the "tree-line" - the point beyond which trees do not grow.

The striking thing about the nearly treeless landscape is the sense of space, which is precisely what I was trying to convey by radically cropping the BEFORE image and changing the aspect ratio to 2:1 from 3:2. You'll notice that I cropped almost entirely from the top, leaving the horizontal content of the frame virtually unchanged in the AFTER image. In other words, what's visible between the right and left sides of the frame is nearly identical in the BEFORE and AFTER images, but the longer, narrower aspect ratio in the AFTER image exaggerates the horizontal space.

The BEFORE image was underexposed, which I addressed with an exposure adjustment of the RAW file.

I used tone curve and fine-contrast adjustments to draw out detail in the beautifully colored ground cover. And I used color temperature and hue/saturation adjustments to compensate for a bluish color cast in the BEFORE image.

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"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

"Bank Street Bridge"

Built in 1912 and restored in 1993, the Bank Street Bridge is the most attractive piece of civil engineering in Ottawa, Ontario. Beautiful lighting makes it especially eye-catching at night. Odd-looking color casts are always an issue when shooting in artificial light. Your camera's white-balance settings may help but probably won't solve all the color problems in situations like this so corrections with image-editing software are necessary. To get rid of the yellowish-bluish cast in the BEFORE image I desaturated and darkened the yellows, reds, blues, cyans and magentas. But while I wanted to reduce these colors in some parts of the image, I was careful to retain them in other areas. I didn't want to lose the yellow lines on the road, the red streak of tail-light, the yellow sign above the arch on the right, the yellows/reds in the foliage and the subtle color variations in the cobblestones. A photoshop layer mask allowed me to precisely target the areas where c

"Bog"

There's a beautiful peat bog at the eastern edge of my home city of Ottawa that I visit often. On this day the bulrushes were swaying in a westerly wind and the scene was lit by the low-angled autumn sun. To capture the motion of the windswept bulrushes I set a shutter speed of 1/4 second. The trees in the background were relatively motionless but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't capture them in sharp focus with the slow shutter speed. This mattered because I wanted to contrast the blur of the bulrushes with the sharp stillness of the trees. Maybe the elevated boardwalk I stood on was vibrating slightly. Who knows? Point was, I needed an easy solution. I took a second exposure (not shown here) at a fast shutter speed to freeze the trees. In photoshop I combined the top part of the the fast-shutter image with the bottom part of the slow-shutter image. I had used a neutral density filter for the slow-shutter image, and removed the filter for the fast-shutter i

The After-image

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