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Keeping with the theme of things that float, but shifting away from the theme of boats specifically, let me present: ducks.

These ducks were floating in the water right next to where Grace’s dad was grilling meat for the big birthday party we were throwing for Grace’s grandfather, which was being held on one of his boats. There were typically between three and six ducks, and only one of them was female.

We were throwing bits of food their way for part of the afternoon, but eventually they moved on; the number of guests evidently exceeded their relative level of comfort with people.

Edit-wise, I used the Vivid preset on this shot to really bring out the details and colour on the ducks. I then manually adjusted the orange and green saturations, reducing the orange and boosting the green. I also applied a bit of sharpening, and bumped the Clarity up a fair bit — I wanted to bring out as many of the intricate features of the shot as I could.

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.

Here’s one more shot from Finn Slough, and old boat that I can only assume has not been seaworthy in quite some time. Then again, I don’t know boats, so perhaps the one in this picture is still capable of holding its own on the water.

But I suspect not.

The more I play with Lightroom 2, the more I get addicted to the diffusion effect that comes with setting the Clarity to a negative value. It just looks good on so many images (not on all, to be fair).

Edit-wise, in addition to the above-mentioned Clarity adjustments, I applied the Vivid preset to bring out many of the colours in this image. However, because of some particularly harsh chromatic aberrations, I had to desaturate the magenta and purple hues quite heavily. Other hues — notably the blues and greens — saw their saturation boosted somewhat.

I also had to do quite a lot of highlight reduction on the sky, but this worked out (more or less), and some cloud detail was recovered from what had otherwise been a washed-out area of the image. A bit of sharpening rounded things out, resulting in the image that you see here, O Reader.

There’s a certain…”not entirely real” quality about the scene.

Of course, no boat can legally operate without certain livesaving measures in place, including lifeboats and whatnot, and from the right angle such things can make for interesting photographic subjects.

I grabbed this shot to finish off one flash card, but rather liked how it came out in post-production; not only do the lines of the image, coupled with the grating of the stairs, have a certain visual appeal to them, but there is also a certain colour contrast which I enjoy every time I see it. Yes, most of the image is gray, but that just makes the orange stand out more by comparison, I think.

Edit-wise, then, the primary adjustments were to the shadows and the orange saturation (which I boosted fairly substantially). I also applied a fair bit of sharpening, which helped with the resolution of the cross-hatching of the grating.

Okay, hopefully from here on in there won’t be anymore discontinuities in terms of what time the daily picture was taken at. This shot, for example, was taken once Grace and I got to my grandparents’ place on Vancouver Island. We wanted to get out for a bit of a walk, and my grandpa was more than happy to tour us around a small forest nearby.

I don’t know for sure when this tree fell over, but the way it landed made for an interesting shot, and it was framed nicely by greenery on all sides. This was actually quite a fun shot to edit, because of how rich the colours were, and I think the picture itself captures nicely the beauty and lushness of a typical British Columbia forest.

Edit-wise, I began by applying my usual calibration/Punch preset to this shot, although I reversed my decision with regard to the Clarity setting of said preset. Clarity was instead set to -50 (from +50) to give a slightly diffuse effect to the image. I boosted the green saturation by quite a lot, and also increased the contrast substantially. Finally, because there wasn’t much ambient light in the forest and as a result I’d found it necessary to increase the ISO to 800, I did some noise reduction on the shot. All of that, coupled with a bit of on-export sharpening by Lightroom (apparently that feature has not yet been “optimized” in any way, shape or form; hard to believe given how well it works!) and the result was the image featured above.

Perhaps I will sound trite for saying this, but there are a lot of very interesting buildings in Vancouver.

This is, I think, the tower at the Central City Shopping Centre in Surrey, in the glow of the setting Sun. The design of the building is, to say the very least, eye-catching, and its all-glass exterior plays with the light in wonderful ways.

Edit-wise, this picture received the standard battery of adjustments — sharpening, the calibration/Punch preset, and a touch of noise reduction and chromatic aberration correction. Initially, I was tempted to try and give it a “diffusion print” look by bumping the Clarity setting down to -100, but instead went the opposite direction and boosted the Clarity to +100 (Punch, by default, sets Clarity to +50). And then, because the colour was better, I switched from the standard colour calibration settings to the “Vivid” settings that I rarely, but sometimes, make use of.

And I have to say, I like the results. The lines of the tower, especially, are very sharp, and the colours rich. And then there’s the tower itself, which I think is just fascinating to look at.

Here’s an image in which I’ve heavily adjusted the saturations of the colours — everything but red has been more or less reduced to nothingness (a bit of orange, purple, and magenta were kept). I took the shot, initially, because I liked the lines of the scene and the way the sunlight was refracting through the glasses on the table. It proved to be a fun one to play with in post-processing, as well.

I grabbed this shot at a Chinese restaurant favoured by Grace’s grandparents, and I like to think of it as a testament to the power that seemingly innocuous things — curtains, in this particular example — have over image colour quality. Functionally, this image looks almost the same with or without all the colours save red removed from it; in fact, I think it looks truer to life when only the red is left in the image.

This is because of two competing factors, both of which can negatively affect image quality. The first, of course, is the source of light in the room (the Sun) and the fact that the light has to filter through red-tinted curtains . The second is white balance, and the EOS 350D’s attempt to compensate for the colour cast it detects in the scene. Taken together, these competing factors produced an initial image that was, shall we say, less than good.

Fortunately, Lightroom gives me very tight control over colour in an image.

In addition to the saturation adjustments, I applied a lot of noise reduction (the camera was at a high ISO setting again) and some sharpening to round things out a bit.

Of course, since we were in the vicinity of Coal Harbour, I had to stop and take a picture of some of the boats. Luckily, there were three rather colourful houseboats moored side-by-side in the harbour, which provided an easy subject.

Edit-wise, this picture actually presented me with a bit of a challenge. In particular, the background was a bit overexposed, and highlight reduction wasn’t reducing that as much as I might have liked. Playing with the shadow clipping helped somewhat, but even then left much to be desired. I applied the calibration/Punch preset, some noise reduction (I had the camera set at ISO 400, as it was getting a bit darker outside due to the rain), and some sharpening, all of which helped to improve the image in small ways.

But for the life of me I just couldn’t get the image to where I wanted it to be.

So I began to experiment. First, I tried applying some vignetting — that helped, somewhat, and made the overexposed parts of the border areas of the image more subdued. It also forced the viewer’s attention on to the boats themselves (a good side effect). But the background still flummoxed me.

So I tried shifting the Clarity of the image around a bit, finally ratcheting it all the way down to -100. This once again applied the “diffusion print” effect to the image…and made it just about perfect. The background suddenly looked good for its overexposure, because the details therein were a little less distinct in a hazy, ethereal sort of way.

I’m glad I read about that Clarity tool — it affords one a small toolset of handy tricks.

Here’s another panoramic from the dockyards near downtown Vancouver.

As usual, this shot was composed with Hugin, and as usual Hugin’s performance was pretty good; I can see a couple small disjoints in this image, but for the most part it is a smooth composition, and I’m happy about that.

Per how I usually handle panoramics, I started by matching the exposures on each of the seven shots comprising this image in Lightroom. I also applied a fairly standard set of presets concerning sharpening, colour calibration, chromatic aberration reduction, and noise reduction. I also tweaked the highlights a little bit, and then exported all the pictures as TIFF files.

The final product out of Hugin was a large image over sixteen thousand pixels wide, which Lightroom wouldn’t have supported but which Lightroom 2 handles just fine; I straightened and cropped it somewhat, brightened everything a little bit, and then exported the final product.

Update: Welcome, Steynians! And don’t worry — I harbour no nefarious intent in taking pictures of the dockyards here. And to be sure, nobody around the area walked over to interdict me in my photo-taking spree, and I was there for a good half hour or so.

Which is not to say that I haven’t been interdicted before, of course; while in England, I was taking pictures of the trains there, and was asked to delete the photos from the camera by a concerned security guard. The lesson that I took away from that, however, was that security guards don’t understand digital cameras all that well. After deleting the offending photos, I switched memory cards in my EOS 350D, pocketing the old card and not using it again until I got home. Once I got back to my office, I ran an “undelete” utility on the card and recovered the missing photos.

Learn the technology, people! Learn it well, because I’m not the only guy who knows how to do data recovery on a memory card. And while my intentions are good — I just like taking pictures a) because a particular scene looks pretty/interesting to me, or b) so that I can have visual catalysts for good memories — not everyone who knows how to use data recovery software has similarly good intentions.