Photo info: FUJIFILM X100T, 23mm, f/4, 1/125 sec, ISO1250 “Homework Kitty” Cedar Park, 2016
こんばんは！Hi, how’s it going?
Tomorrow my wife and kids are leaving for a summer vacation trip, so today was spent preparing and packing. In the photo above, you can see our son Koa working on his Japanese homework, and our kitten Yuzu is keeping him company, as cats do. 🐱 I took the photo using standard Fujfilm Provia film simulation, then I edited the JPEG in Nik Silver Efex Pro 2, which is a great way to convert to black and white and find just the right look.
Starting tomorrow I will be a summer bachelor for a while but I still have two cats and a dog to keep me company so I shouldn’t be too lonely. I’ll also have some tasks to do around the house and I predict that I will be spending a lot of time at work too, trying to get ahead on projects while I have the chance to put in a few extra hours.
This will be maybe the 4th time I’ve been a summer bachelor so I am pretty used to it and know what to expect… but this year will be different in a not so good way – Mariko did not cook a big pot of curry for me to live off of! What am I gonna do? 😧 🍛
This evening after dinner, we went to an arcade called Pinballz to play some games. This arcade is really cool because they have dozens of pinball machines, from very old classics to some relatively new ones. It was so nostalgic to see all these machines from my childhood memories! Isn’t it cool when you can awaken those memories that haven’t seen the light of day for many years? The human brain is amazing… memories that have been buried for so long can somehow reappear!
Pinballz also has old video games as well, many of them I haven’t played for 30 years or so, including Zaxxon and Wizard of Wor. I had a lot of fun playing those games with my brother back at the mall in our hometown. A wonderful period of my life, the ’80s!
Besides all the fun games, Pinballz Lakeline also serves food and beer. Mariko and I shared a nice draft brew while we played pinball with the kids. I was so much fun… I’m looking forward to visiting again in the future.
Today’s photo is of my son showing off his skills. For the post-processing of this indoor shot, I first used Perfect Exposure, which is a free plugin for Lightroom. It can quickly fix poorly exposed photos, like the ones I took in the dark arcade, which has lots of different types of lighting. Next, I adjusted the vibrance and saturation in Lightroom, added a little bit of grain, and voila! All done.
As you can see from today’s photo, we had sushi! It’s my son’s 15th birthday today, so we went to his favorite restaurant to dine on delicious Japanese food. Our friend prepared this amazing selection of sushi, which included some beef! It was all so yummy, I could have eaten all night.
I’m so happy that our kids are relatively open-minded about food. My wife and I love to try so many different kinds of cuisines, so Bay and Koa are used to giving new foods a try. Of course they have certain foods that they really don’t like, for instance Bay cannot stand mushrooms, and Koa doesn’t like sushi rice (although he likes the fish). I am pretty sure that in time, they will grow to enjoy these foods as well! 😄
The photo below is from the box of uni (sea urchin) that we enjoyed. It was from Japan and was super delicious! I wish I could eat it every day. 🍣
Tonight’s photos were taken at a relatively high ISO of 6400, but the Fujifilm X-Trans II sensor handles it amazingly well. I don’t mind shooting at 6400 at all with my X100T, in fact, I have the Auto ISO range from 200-6400 which is something I would use only in extreme situations on my dslr. I think it is fantastic that cameras keep getting better at high-ISO. It’s the area where I think we can benefit the most.
I used the Fujifilm standard Provia film simulation for both of these photos, and in Lightroom I adjusted the white balance a tiny bit, deepened the blacks, brought back some shadows, and bumped up the vibrance a little. I then added a slight vignette and a some of grain, which is pretty much my standard look these days.
I hope you had a great Thursday. We’ve almost made it to the weekend!
Photo info: FUJIFILM X100T, 23mm, f/8, 1/1250 sec, ISO400 “Texas Sunset” Cedar Park, 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!
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! 😄
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!
Light Polarization
Heavy Polarization
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.
