timeimmortal

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I tried another shot of the tree in Grace’s grandparents’ back yard on one of the few days during our vacation that we actually got a glimpse of blue skies. The Sun was setting when I took this, and one can discern — through the maze of branches — a fiery orange hue cast upon the upper part of the tree.

Much like the previous shot of this tree that I attempted, this shot was taken with my lens set to its widest possible setting (17 mm), which I prefer to avoid the use of when I can but which, under certain circumstances, can work out for me if I’m careful. Principally, I’m worried about barrel distortion, which on the lens in question can be quite pronounced at its shallowest focal length. Equally, though, the problem of intense chromatic aberration (especially at the borders of the photo) looms large at 17 mm.

And it was the chromatic fringing that I had to adjust for in Lightroom — this eventually required me to reduce the purple and magenta saturations to -100, and even then I don’t think I managed to clean all the offending flared colour out of the picture.

Other edits to this shot included heavier noise reduction, owing to the fact that I was shooting at ISO 800 (which is pretty high on the EOS 350D. I applied the usual calibration/Punch preset as well, to bring out the colour. And I also boosted the green and blue saturations a fair bit. Lastly, the sky required some fairly hefty highlight reduction. In spite of all the tweaking that had to be done, though, the picture itself turned out really well, for which I’m grateful.

It’s kind of nice to not have a large buffer of images to wait through after getting back from a trip — I like that I can bring the pictures to you, the Reader, while the memory of taking them is still fresh in mind.

I grabbed this shot while killing some time in Grace’s grandparents’ back yard. It’s just a picture of some of the local greenery (they live on a whole acre in the middle of Surrey, so they actually have a nice stand of trees in the back yard). This one branch was kind if standing out from the others.

When I look at this shot, my eyes want to tell me that I’m seeing something with quite heavy barrel distortion, although that is not the case — the branch just curves that way. Edit-wise, I applied a different preset than my usual calibration scheme, instead choosing to use an until-now unused “Vivid” settings package that produced, in this shot, an effect not unlike that of the Direct Positive preset, although not quite the same. I also added in the vignetting in post-processing, and rather like the effect it has on the image as a whole.