timeimmortal

I wonder if it is possible to see something more beautiful, in this world, than my loving wife smiling back at me?

Grace shows off her baby bump. I used iPhoto to add the vignetting to this shot.

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I’m thinking that the “full size” images don’t look as sharp as they should; maybe it’s iPhoto. I may need to look at other scaling options along my editing pipeline.

This is a fairly straightforward picture of some of the little harbour/inlet that the boat were were using as a party venue was docked in. I’d have given…well…something, at any rate, for the sky to be less cloudy than it was, but things weren’t shaping up that way, so I made do.

Edit-wise, I decided to rely on contrast to make this picture a bit more interesting, and overall I think it worked out. There’s something to be said for being able to bring out the contour and texture of the clouds without diminshing the foreground details into a black, uninteresting mass. Lightroom’s “Fill Light” tool helped out there.

Framing also helps the shot — putting the foreground dock remnant (at least, that’s what I think it is) off-centre like that helps make the image a bit more visually interesting, without sacrificing a glimpse of any of the important details of the scene.

How about another panoramic? As a general rule, almost every panoramic I have composed has wound up being featured as a Pic of the Day, and certainly there was no way I was going to pass up posting this one.

One of the biggest things I struggle against in editing photos is the natural “fade” that accompanies long-distance shots. As the distance between the lens and the scenery in question increases, the colours become more subdued and hazy. This effect isn’t the easiest to correct for (a UV filter helps a bit, but only a bit), and typically requires a fair number of adjustments. In the past, I’ve gotten lucky with iPhoto’s “Enhance” tool, which has generally done well to bring out the details that distance has diminished.

This time, though, I managed to get the look I wanted in Lightroom.

As usual, I began by editing each photo separately, matching exposures and adjusting colours somewhat in order to get a uniform look across all the shots. I then exported the pictures as TIFF files and loaded them into Hugin, my panorama editor, and lined them up manually using a fair number of control points between each shot.

As usual, Hugin rendered the image well (I can detect a couple of flaws, but that’s okay), and I loaded the result back into Lightroom for additional editing. After fiddling with the contrast and shadow intensity for a bit, and bumping the Clarity up quite high, I got the image to the point it’s at above, which I find quite satisfactory.

Have I mentioned that I’m glad that Lightroom no longer prohibits the import and manipulation of images wider than 10,000 pixels?

Just for good measure, here’s one final picture from my half-hour wander through Grace’s grandparents’ yard — a large tree that sits just astride their driveway.

I’m usually leery of using the 17 mm focal length on my stabilized lens, because it tends not to be all that sharp, and as an added bonus often tends to inflict rather pronounced barrel distortion on objects in the image. For this shot, though, that widest-possible focal length worked out not badly at all, owing (I think) to the angle from which I was viewing the tree.

The branches of the tree are a bit tangled, but for the most part they flare out from the trunk of the tree in a rather visually appealing way. Green and brown play off of each other rather nicely, and even a few hints of the blue sky (which is mostly washed out, but not completely so) poke their way into the shot. I took this by just standing beneath the tree and looking more or less straight up, and I’m fairly pleased with the results.

Edit-wise, I applied my usual calibration/Punch preset, did a touch of noise reduction, and dropped some of the colour channel saturations down to reduce spurious details. I also ran this photo through iPhoto’s “Enhance” feature, which brought out the last of its detail quite handily.

The day after we saw the Parthenon and the Ancient Agora, Grace and I set out to see a few more archaeological sites in the middle of Athens. The first place we set out for was an ancient graveyard, and along the way we had to pass down a rather busy, dirty, noisy road.

I couldn’t help but noticing that some of the buildings along the way were in…bad shape.

We saw it on Crete, and we saw it again here: a lot of buildings in Greece look as though nobody has bothered to repair the bomb damage from World War II. This was just one more example.

That said, I managed to capture the building from a pretty appealing angle. Edit-wise, I had to do some highlight recovery (clouds can make for a very bright background), as well as some fringe reduction. That was all in Lightroom. I then tried to run the iPhoto ‘Enhance’ option on the picture, but nothing really changed. It’s rare when that happens, but when it happens I usually take it as a sign that I got the post-processing almost exactly where it needed to be.