timeimmortal

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.

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.