Central Florida Photo Ops

I listen to the Digital Story podcast . The June 2007 photo assignment is “Before and After”. The idea is to submit two images showing how you “developed” the final photo.

I also just bought the book Examples, The Making of 40 Photographs , by Ansel Adams. He writes about how he re-visited his negatives over the years and was able to make better prints with additional effort / technique.

So these two things inspired me to go back to a photo I took in March, reprocess it and submit it to the Digital Story. Here are the steps I went through:

The first photo is the scene as I saw it from the road. Lynn and I were driving to an auction up in Ocala Florida and this looked like it could make a good image. It was a bit cluttered, and the composition wasn’t good, so …

The second photo was taken after I stepped inside the gate. Better composition, I think. This is how it appears with no adjustments after importing it into Lightroom . I had underexposed it a bit so that the clouds would show up well. As a result, the road into the trees was pretty dark (and there still wasn’t enough detail in the clouds). I played around with it in the Develop module, but still couldn’t get the exposure quite right. So …

Photo 3 shows the result after I exported two 16 bit TIFF versions of the image from Lightroom and combined them. One with an exposure bias of +2 and a second with it set at 0. Then I used Photomatix to create a High Dynamic Range / tone mapped version. Much better exposure and detail both in the clouds and trees. This was pretty good, but I still wasn’t happy …

I loaded #3 into Photoshop Elements, cloned out the distractions (lights, signs, houses, rags, fire hydrant, wires) and then re-imported it into Lightroom …

Photo 4 shows the final result after using Lightroom’s wonderful B&W conversion tool. You can play around with different color channels to emphasize different things in the picture. It’s like being able to use color filters over your lens after you’ve taken the picture! I think the final result is much better than the original.

Here’s a link to my gallery with all of the images in sequence.

You can see all of the entries in the Digital Story June photo assignment here .

Tendai asked me about camera settings for shooting space shuttle launches. Rather than write them down, I looked through my photos and posted the ones I’ve taken, along with the EXIF data (where available) giving the settings I used.

I took a new set of pictures yesterday. I’m really pleased to be able to see the Solid Rocket Booster sequence from my front yard. (We’re over 50 miles from the launch site). I used my new Nikon 70 – 300, F4.5 – 5.6, IS lens and mounted the camera on a tripod on my driveway. I really like the lens.

My gallery of shuttle pictures is here.

I had heard about Orlando Wetlands Park and finally decided to go see it one morning. The park is near Christmas, Florida off of highway 50 east of Orlando.

I got there right at dawn and hiked along the dike through the park. I took several bracketed landscape sequences to combine into HDR photos. There were quite a few birds, and a pair of bellowing alligators courting in the swamp. Near the end of my hike, I came across a family of river otters. I was quite surprised (they were too) and they were moving pretty fast, so my handheld 300 mm shot is a bit blurry – sorry.

My photos are here .

The Orlando Wetlands Park website is here.