Seeing Pictures

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I am big on seeing pictures and making pictures, as you guys know.

Here is an example of seeing a picture and making a picture - from a seemingly boring scene from the rooftop of our hotel in South Beach where I held recent my Travel Photography Workshop.

I really can't take credit for this one. Julie Johnson, one of my South Beach Workshop students, came up with the idea for a close-up of the building in the distance. After taking the top shot (as a before shot), I zoomed in for the second shot (as the after shot) and changed the color (using Hue in Photoshop) of the scene.

The idea here: you can find pictures everywhere. You just need to look for them.

Good work, Julie!

Explore the Light,
Rick


Sunrise at South Beach

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Today was the last sunrise shoot on my South Beach workshop - the best light of the week.

Sure, we shot lots of HDR images over the past few days - and learned how to process the images in Photomatix, Photoshop and Topaz Adjust.

However, this non-HDR silhouette of a man feeding the seagulls is one of my favorite images from the workshop.

I did add a touch of Topaz Adjust to enhance the color in the sky clouds.

When shooting at sunrise and sunset, and almost always, try to expose for the highlights. Watch your histogram and overexposure warning on your camera's LCD monitor.

For me, the seagulls make this shot. However, for the HDR shots of the lifeguard stands that we were also taking, the birds were ruining the shots – because they showed up looking like dust spots on the image sensor. Kinda funny how the same subject can be good or bad.... depending on what you are looking for.

All the images you saw on my blog this week were taken with Canon 5D Mark II and either my 17-40mm lens (this shot) or my 24-105mm lens.

Explore the light,
Rick

Create Beautiful Black & White Images

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While teaching my workshop here in South Beach, one of the students asked me about Nik Software's Color Efex Pro. Well, I was happy to demo!

The bottom image was created in Color Efex Pro using the Black and White effect. The key to creating this cool images was to set the filter color to yellow. Setting it to other colors produces a different effect - some good and some not so good.

When working with the Black and White filter (with Color Efex Pro and with Nik's Silver Efex pro, which is GREAT for black and white, too), play around with the color filter. You'll be quite surprised at the variations you'll get.

Explore the Light,
Rick

P.S. You can get a discount on all Nik products, as well as some other plug-ins, at the Plug-in Experience.