Photo of the Week - Week 31

I'm still working my way through the photos I took on our recent trip to Mindo. I took some photos of orchids and, after working on a few of them, I particularly like the symmetry of the below flower.

EXIF Info
Shutter Speed: 1/40s
ISO: 200
Aperture: F/9.0
Focal Length: 50mm
Lens: Tamron 17-55mm

The above image began with a larger one (take a look on my Flickr site to see it) but I rotated it and cropped it to get the above composition.

Photo of the Week - Week 30

I'm continuing to play catch-up so I can get 52 posts in the year ... But here is another photo from Mindo. We really enjoy hiking around the trails that surround the place that we stay at in Mindo. I took an original image, but did so with some specific post-processing in mind to tweak it a bit.

Here is the final image:

EXIF Info
Shutter Speed: 3.2s
ISO: 200
Aperture: F/22.0
Focal Length: 17mm
Lens: Tamron 17-55mm

One of the things I wanted to do for this image is to create something of a starburst effect coming from the light area near the center. Just something subtle, not too much. After some hunting around YouTube, I found a video that did a quick walk-through of how to do that. I came up with the following:

I added this as a layer above the original area, moving it around until is was centered, then I played with the opacity and the layer effect until I had what I wanted.

I put the flattened image back into Lightroom where I added a brush effect in a few places to lighten and darken to try and match the starburst a bit.

Photo of the Week - Week 29

We recently had the opportunity to return to Mindo, one of our favorite places to visit here in Ecuador. That said, there is still a lot to see! We stayed at our usual spot - Casa Divina Lodge, a great, family-run lodge that is well-removed from everything.

On the road into Casa Divina there is a pasture area and there was a beautiful horse there. Clara, being enamored with horses, just had to go and see her. As we were taking a daddy-daughters hike around, we went to where the horse is. She was very social and trotted right over to us and loved all of the attention Clara was lavishing on her. She did see a bit camera shy, but I was able to get the below shot:

EXIF Info
Shutter Speed: 1/30s
ISO: 100
Aperture: F/8,0
Focal Length: 104mm
Lens: Canon/L 70-200mm

Just a little post-processing - the cream-tone conversion, added an iris blur to blur the scene surrounding the horse's head, and a vignette to finish things off.

Photo of the Week - Week 28

I had the opportunity to do another set of family portraits recently and have been learning some things in Photoshop and Lightroom.

Here's on of the photos, which I will use to walk through my process:

EXIF Data
Shutter speed: 1/100s
Aperture: F9.0
Focal length:  19mm
ISO:200
Lens: Tamron 17-55mm

This is lit with three lights - one in a 24x24 softbox, just over the camera, and two shoot-through umbrellas on either side. Lights are at 1/4 power, if I remember correctly.

The first problem I ran into was the size of my backdrop - just not big enough - so I knew that I would have to do some post-processing to fix that. A formal family portrait just doesn't work with kids toys (mine, not theirs) strewn around in the background.

I tweaked a couple of things in Lightroom (exposure) and then sent it over to Photoshop. In there I duplicated the layer so it was two duplicates on top of one another. In the lower layer I used a large paintbrush to paint a white background, overlapping the subjects in the image. Back in the top layer, I used the quick select to outline the subjects, zooming in to refine it, and set that as the layer mask.

One of the great things about Photoshop is the "refine edge" mask - you can "paint" certain areas (like hair) and it will refine the mask in those areas to pick up stray hairs and make the mask look very nice; you end up with very natural-looking edges.

With that done, I finally had a white backdrop for my subjects. While I had a fair-looking edge around my subjects, there were some parts that were not that great. I decided to use a very fuzzy brush to paint around some of those areas; since I had overlapped my big white brush to make the backdrop, I would be partially revealing a white background - essentially making that edge look somewhat blow out. As I did this, it found that it looked like I had lit my subjects with harsh, bright light. When I sent the image back to Lightroom, I bumped the clarity up quite a bit to really bring out the details. The end product is almost like I ran it through a high-pass filter.