Photo of the Week - Week 15

The LDS Church has a (somewhat) new initiative to plug into its members across the globe and crowd source several things like document translation and photos - the Vineyard. I decided to submit my recent photos of the LDS Temple in Guayaquil and it was accepted! So, if at some point you see this photo show up, you know where you saw it first!

The other photo I had planned to highlight for a photo of the week was accidentally deleted ... that's what happens when I get overzealous in cleaning out my photos!

Photo of the Week - Week 14

Time keeps on slipping by and I realize I'm yet one more week behind in my photo goal ...

This week's photo comes from our recent visit to the Museo Interactive de Ciencias (Interactive Science Museum) - one of the best kid-oriented museums we've ever been to. The site used to be a textile factory and part of it is a museum to that industry; they still have a lot of the machines in there and displays to explain everything.

We were recently there to celebrate Natalie's birthday and I took the opportunity to take a few pictures - a kind of exploratory visit for me, photographically speaking, and I really want to get back there sometime to take some more photos. Here is one of my favorites:

Camera Info
Shutter Speed: 1/50s
ISO: 12,800
Aperture: F2.8
Lens: Tamron 17-50mm
Focal Length: 45mm
Aperture Priority Mode


The mix of light in there - tungsten, sunlight, and other lights - makes for some interesting color combinations. In the picture above the machine closest to me is illuminated by a warm tungsten light, but the background is a totally different light, so you have this warm orange cast light contrasting with the cold blue light in the background.

I had to shoot at a really high ISO and then used Lightroom 4 to clean up the noise. While Lightroom does a great job cleaning up the noise, I would like to shoot a higher aperture and low ISO next time, which means I'll need to bring my tripod along.

Take a look at my Flickr page to see more photos from this excursion.

Photo of the Week - Week 13

I finally got the chance to go to the botanical gardens here in Quito. I've barely started going through my photos, but came up with a couple for this post.

So how do you spice up a kind of blase nature scene? Set up for a longer exposure and then zoom while it exposes.

So here is the scene:

Here's the same scene, but zooming while the shutter is open (explosion of life!):

Camera Info:
Shutter speed: .8s
Aperture: F8.0
Lens: Canon 70-200mm

Here's another example with some flowers:

Photo of the Week - Week 12

This week's topic - refining my workflow between Lightroom and Photoshop.

Since I've started using Lightroom and the new beta version of Photoshop CS6, I've been working on how to integrate them, which I've found to be quite easy.

Here's the final image:

Camera Info
Shutter Speed: 1/15s
Aperture: F6.3
ISO: 100
Lens: Canon EF 50mm II
Focal Length: 50mm
Flash: Single flash, 1/4 power, through softbox

I begin by downloading my images from the memory card and onto my computer using Lightroom.

Once they are in Lightroom, I use that to do most of my polishing and edits - color balance, contrast, sharpening, add a slight vignette. A lot of the time I can get the image where I want it using just Lightroom.

The above image, however, had a hair going right down the middle of her face, which was rather distracting. With my image pretty much the way I wanted it, I simply right-clicked on it and opened it in Photoshop.

One of the tools I really like in Photoshop is content-aware healing. This is great because all I did was use a brush tool to highlight the hair and then, voila! It was gone.

With that done, I saved the image and the newly-edit version appeared in Lightroom. From there I exported it as a JPEG, with the above results.