Time Immortal

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Time for another picture of ducks, I think. Just before they all flew away, the number of ducks floating near the dock grew to…quite a large number, and I managed to capture three of them in one frame.

I applied almost exactly the same edits to this photo as I did to the previous duck picture, right down to the use of the Vivid preset.

However, unlike in that picture, I didn’t ratchet the Clarity all the way to +100 — in fact, I did exactly the opposite, dropping it back to -100 and giving the image a more diffuse feel. I don’t know what possessed me to try that, but it worked out; the picture looks just that much better for it (and the diffusion, mercifully, didn’t obscure some of the finer details of the ducks’ feathers). I’m really beginning to love how that feature of Lightroom 2 works.

A bit of highlight recovery rounded out the edits, along with some work to reduce chromatic aberrations.

I like the formation these three fellows are in, as though they all departed a common point at different angles.

Here’s one more shot of the fishing trawlers in Steveston.

I kind of violated what I am trying to make into a rule for myself: where possible, and except in case of sunrise or sunset photos, do not shoot into the Sun. And while technically the Sun is off to the right in this picture, I still had a lot of highlight recovery to do to get this image back into the “acceptable” category.

That said, the edits did work out rather well, enough so that I decided to post the picture on the ol’ blog here. There’s lots of details in this shot — riggings, divots and pits on the hulls of the ships, and so forth — that really give the eye lots to wander over.

Edit-wise, in addition to the aforementioned highlight recovery and a host of saturation adjustments to get rid of some harsh chromatic aberration (and to restore colour lost in the highlight reduction process), I applied a fair bit of sharpening to firm up some of the fine detail. I thought, briefly, about messing with the Clarity as well, but chose, in the end, to leave it at the preset’s default value of 50.