Month: June 2016

こんばんは！How’s it going?

This evening I happened to glance outside our window and see some light streaming above a cloud, so I grabbed my camera, ran upstairs and snapped this photo. I used the circular polarizer because I was shooting through a window, but I don’t know if it helped at all. I suppose it could have reduced any reflection, but I wonder if the angle was correct.

At any rate, I got a nice capture and decided to see what I can do in Lightroom. Normally I will import the jpeg and then apply a nice “S-shaped” tone curve, adjust vibrance and saturation, apply some grain and save for upload. But tonight I decided to spend a bit more time to do some more editing.

A fun thing I did was to paint in some selections using the Wacom tablet. First, I painted in some clarity and sharpening around edges of the center clouds to add detail. Secondly, I made a new brush to darken some areas using negative exposure. You can see in the top-right corner, and center-top that I darkened the sky a bit to add more variation. The tablet is so fun to use with Lightroom – I highly recommend getting one!

To add a bit more color, I adjusted the vibrance and saturation, but also added a few linear gradients. There’s one coming up from the bottom added some more warmth with a pale orange color and white-balance shift. Then up in the sky, I added one in the upper-right to add a touch of purple via white balance shift, and in the upper-left, some blue. It’s really fun to add color gradients or white balance edits this way. I did it quite a bit in another photo of mine several months ago.

I think the final image of the cloud is a bit exaggerated, but I like it. I think it could have been even better if there was a jet streaking across the sky leaving a contrail behind, or even a few birds flying in the sky. Just one more element to add more interest.

Anyways, for comparison, here’s the original image:

If you use Lightroom and are curious, I’ve saved all my adjustments to a preset and shared it, along with the original JPEG below. I use Lightroom 5, but the preset probably works with other versions as well. Enjoy!

Get the original image and Lightroom 5 Preset via Google Drive

In other happenings, I was reading about the terrorist attack in Istanbul. How awful… so much violence in the world. 😔 Whenever I turn on the news, there are so many negative things being reported… floods, airplane crashes, hate crimes, etc… I almost would rather hide away from all that. But what can you do but focus on being positive? Teach your kids to be open-minded, respectful, and compassionate, especially when they are young. I guess that is a start.

Anyways, I hope you had some moments of joy today. Even the little things! 😄

おやすみなさい！

– B 

Today’s daily prompt from WordPress was coincidentally Clouds! ☁️

こんばんは！

Tonight’s photo is of (surprise!) another cloud. ☁️ I realize that clouds are one of my favorite subjects to make photos of, so I did a little research on how to make better photos of them.

One thing that people have recommended using is a polarizing filter. Usually this type of filter is used to reduce reflections off of glass or water, but it also gives better definition and contrast to the sky and clouds. I honestly don’t know how much of an effect it will have since I usually do some editing in Lightroom to get the style I like, but since I already own a circular polarizer, I figured, why not?

After buying a step-up ring so that the 55mm filter would fit on the 49mm thread on my X100T, I took a few photos while I was out and about with my son Koa. There were a lot of nice clouds in the sky because of the approaching storm so I took the opportunity to make a few photos.

Below you can see how the polarizing filter can cut the reflections out of the photo. The circular polarizer actually rotates so you can dial in how much of an effect you want to achieve. In the photo on the left, I kept a pretty heavy reflection, but for the photo on the right, I rotated the filter and the reflections disappeared like magic! If you click on the photos, you can see that the cloud reflections on the hood of my car were eliminated as well. Pretty slick!

Anyways, I played around with the image in Lightroom and eventually I found the look I wanted, which is the black and white version below. I used Nik Silver Efex Pro2 to convert the color image to black and white.

I hope you had a nice Tuesday! We’re almost over the hump… just one more day and then it’s a straight shot to the long weekend here in the States. 😄

おやすみなさい！

– B