Chadwick Lead Works
Chadwick Lead Works 5-frame panorama
This building, in the heart of downtown Boston amidst very modern skyscrapers, was once the home of Chadwick Lead Works (obviously). Given that it was built in 1887 it was amazing (and rather charming) to see it standing in a modern downtown area.
This shot is a panoramic stitch of five frames taken from the sidewalk across the street. I would shoot one frame then move down the sidewalk a bit to take the next shot. Having been stitched from several frames you can zoom in and see quite a bit of detail (click the image to get to flickr where you can view the larger size).
St. John’s Chapel, Tower of London
St. John's Chapel, Tower of London
There’s something amazing about a building which is still standing after nearly 1000 years. This is St. John’s Chapel in the White Tower…in the Tower of London. This image is from 3 handheld exposures — part HDR, part composite. The dynamic range was extreme here with the dark shadows and the bright light streaming in the windows.
Shattered Reflections…and Curves Adjustment Layers
Shattered Reflection 50mm, f/5.6, 1/25s, ISO 400
My daughter and I were on a walk in downtown Austin today and ran across this shattered glass in a door. I snapped a shot of my reflected portrait. I had a mind to see what I could bring out of it using Photoshop’s curves layers. I knew from past experience that curves could do some cool stuff to images like this.
The images at the bottom of the post were taken inside the decommissioned Seaholm Power Plant in Austin (posts about that here and here and here). The blown-out spots in the original image are from bright daylight coming in through windows on the opposite side of the building. Inspired by David Nightingale’s tutorials on creating dramatic images, I experimented with all sorts of wacky curves and masks. With some of those wacky curves adjustments the blown-out spots really created problems so in the end I just cropped them out. The final image is rather abstract — the hand is obvious but the camera, tripod, and my body are there but not completely obvious. There are a few issues (knuckles on the hand for example) but it’s fun nonetheless.
Seaholm Power Plant Door, after curves adjustments
Back to the images at the top of the post. You may already know that curves adjustments can cause a color shift depending on the blend mode of the layer. I took advantage of this to bring out a bunch of color in this image. It would have been nice if I’d been wearing something other than a black jacket but I didn’t exactly plan this in advance. The adjustments on this image were just a strong s-curve and a combination of curves which lightened/darkened the midtones — all in normal blend mode and masked a bit here and there. Some selective sharpening, noise reduction, and a small bit of overall saturation were added.
The Great Court
The Great Court 10mm, f4.5, 1/500s nominal
During my not-a-photo-trip to Paris and London this past spring I still managed some interesting (IMO) shots. This image taken in the Great Court inside the British Museum has been one of my favorites from the standpoint of its composition and the contrast of the blues and greens against the drab-ish stone. Again, that’s just my opinion of course.
I’ve had difficulty processing this image, however. I really wanted to process as an HDR and the three original handheld exposures were extremely difficult to line up properly. I’ve noted that when shooting wide angles a slight bit of movement and/or rotation between exposures makes a huge difference. Because of this, Photomatix did a very poor job of alignment and this left a lot of ghosting in the image. Of course, I had the ability to mix the tonemapped image with the original exposures but it was proving to be a lot of work to tweak pieces of each layer to line up with the section I wanted to mask it into. It also took more work than usual to get the original exposures looking just right in order to match the main image. I pushed the texture and HDR-ishness farther than I normally do…just because it seems to work here.
One mistake that I couldn’t overcome was the fact that the light coming through the glass roof was blown out in all the exposures. I call that a “mistake” but I really wasn’t taking the time to think through all the shots because I was doing very well at keeping the trip about time with my wife, not about photography. Heath O’Fee has a good post about mistakes like this by the way — they don’t always ruin the shot [Here’s the link: http://yycofee.wordpress.com/2010/08/30/mistakes/].
Well, there it is — one of *my* favorite images.
Michael Tuuk Photography 