Time Immortal

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

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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 a closer look at one of the ships in Steveston harbour.

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It’s just an old fishing trawler, but I liked the colour. This shot, though, disappoints me in a certain way, as I think it demonstrates that there are situations where I need a lens with a wider focal length than just 17 mm.

Sadly, a good 10-20 mm lens costs several hundred dollars, so I’m thinking it’ll be a while before I am able to expand my arsenal of wide angle lenses.

Edit-wise, I played with the blue saturation a fair bit for this shot; I also edited the shadows and contrast fairly heavily to bring out details a bit more. Most of the rest was done with just the usual few clicks — Lightroom allows the user to put a lot of power into presets.

Steveston harbour is home to a fleet of what are, for the most part, fishing boats.

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The boat marked “CASH” is, I’m told, not a fishing boat per sé, but rather a boat that will meet fishers and basically buy their current catch to bring back to the harbour (so the actual fishing boats can, presumably, stay out longer).

Not a bad system, really. At least, it doesn’t sound like a bad system. If any of my readers are fishermen and would care to offer a differing opinion, I’d be happy to publish it.

Edit-wise, this picture was pretty straightforward: the calibration/Punch preset gave the image a good mix of colour and contrast, and a few adjustments to the highlights, exposure, and shadows brought out a bit more detail. I also applied a touch of noise reduction and a bit of chromatic aberration correction for good measure.

Time for another panoramic. I’m not sure, but it seems to me that I took quite a lot of panoramic images in Vancouver — while I don’t think I took as many as I did while in England, I wonder if the overall frequency, relative to the duration of the trip, was higher?

Anyhow, the picture:

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This is a small harbour along Westwater Drive near Richmond, British Columbia. It’s on the road that more or less connects the area near Finn Slough with Steveston, a harbour community south of Richmond, and apparently the home to more than a few interesting shops.

Anyhow, Grace’s parents stopped the van so that both Grace’s sister and I could take some pictures of the harbour (it is a good view, even if it is a bit cloudy), and for whatever reason I decided to take yet another panoramic image set.

Edit-wise, I matched exposures between the images (as usual) and did some basic editing to clean up chromatic aberration, digital noise, and other issues. I then exported each image as a TIFF file, and loaded the whole lot of them into Hugin.

Experience with other harbour panoramics has taught me that a lot of control points are necessary for images of this nature, so I went a little bit crazy in defining said points, but I think it worked out for the best. Hugin did its job well, and I have only found one notable misalignment in the image so far. And it’s a big image (nearly 11,000 pixels wide).

Once the panoramic had been rendered, I loaded it back into Lightroom and did a few additional edits, including saturation adjustments and some additional exposure tweaking. I also set the Clarity to -100, which gave the image a slightly diffuse, not-quite-misty feel that I like.