The World is Round

I love to show a world that is different from reality and one of my favourite ways of distorting it is using a fish-eye lens. When shooting at the sky however, lighting issues come into play and I've been playing around with this photo for a couple of days trying to get a natural looking version. Somehow I can't seem to get it quite right.

In the end, as is so often the case, I preferred the result in black and white.

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Linking up with Skywatch Friday.

Why I like to shoot in colour

As I said in a previous post, I often shoot using a  high contrast black and white setting, but I always make sure to use RAW + jpg so that I have a colour version available as well. Although it gives me a rough idea of what the scene will look like, sometimes that high contrast setting just doesn't give the best result and then I go back to Photoshop to improve on the result.

This photo was one such case.

The high contrast version lost a lot of detail from the sky, so I tried several different edits in both black and white and colour and this was one of my favourites.

Before I started using a digital camera I occasionally experimented with black and white, but not often because film was expensive and it wasn't possible to switch back to using colour until the film was finished. However one thing I learnt back then was that putting a colour filter in front of the lens could dramatically change the resulting photo. Sadly there was no screen to show the result, so if I got it wrong, that was then end of it.

In the days of digital, shooting colour allows one to add that colour filter during the editing process, so here are a couple of different edits, showing just how much difference they can make.

First the infra-red filter, which darkened the blue sky and made the green in the trees look lighter and brighter.

And then the one that I'm not really too keen on, but had to show for comparison. The blue filter turned the sky really pale, with the clouds and crane becoming far less conspicuous, while the trees are now much too dark.

Finally a word on the photo itself. Looking at this photo which was taken a little over two years ago makes me realise just how fast my city is changing. There is now a big building standing on that spot. But there is still a lot of construction going on all over Johannesburg.

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Linking up with Through My Lens and Black and White View.

Bringing Out the Sunbeams

I don't often show unedited photos, but this post is about editing, so I'm forced to make an exception to my rule.

A couple of years ago I took a photo of a beautiful sky full of clouds with a few sunbeams bursting through. I was really disappointed with the result. My camera tried its best to expose the scene correctly but there was simply too much contrast for it to see what I had seen.

The unedited original

Back then I tried to edit the scene to enhance those sunbeams, but in the process the landscape turned to a silhouette.

I like a good silhouette, but I wasn't particularly happy with this one.

I gave up after that because I didn't know how to fix it.

Last night I decided to have another go at editing that photo.

With the help of some recently acquired Photoshop plug-ins, I was amazed at the detail I was able to recover.

I still wasn't totally happy though. I'd now created something that was much brighter than what I'd seen that day. So this morning it was back to Photoshop to try again.

I think that's about as close as I'm going to get to reality.

Finally I decided to see what it looked like in black and white.

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Linking up to Skywatch Friday.