I have to be perfectly honest with you; I was a little lazy
doing this week’s challenge. The laziness
was not because I do not enjoy landscapes, I do, but is winter and the scenery
in DC is not that great right now. It might be better if we had some snow but
we do not so it just looks dead. In
addition, I did not get up early to catch the sunrise, and the sunset I had
just did not work out due to all the clouds. I know these things sound like excuses, and
they probably are, but sometimes I think you are allowed to be lazy at least
during the winter. Now onto the photo.
I took this shot on a hill behind where I live that is
actually a tiny park marking a historical site. Historical sites are everywhere in DC. I shot this around 5:00PM, facing towards DC
with heavy cloud cover. This is the
direction the sun rises but the direction of sun set has no points of interest
and the sky in that direction was shrouded in heavy clouds so there was no
color in the sky in that direction. I mounted my camera on a Manfrotto tripod,
and used my 18-200mm lens set at 80mm with a f20 aperture and a 1/8 second
shutter at ISO 400. I also had a NP4 neutral
density filter on the front of my camera to balance out the sky and the city.As you can see the original picture straight out of camera (below)
has no pop and is very flat.
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| Original Image Straight Out of Camera |
Therefore,
I adjusted it using Lightroom. The first thing I did was balance the whole
picture for a cloudy day, and then applied a graduated filter to the sky. I then adjusted the saturation levels,
sharpness, and for lens correction. I then
applied a pre-set to bring out the color a little more. The final picture is a bit more dramatic, but
I would not say fantastic.
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| Final Edited Image |
I did take several shots, and played around with them via
Lightroom to see if I could improve them from the original straight out of
camera image, but sometime there is just no helping the image. I placed a few additional images below.
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| Additional image |
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| Additional Image |
I learned this week there sometimes there is just no good
shot, there is no helping a lousy photo,
and I have to get a jump on the landscape week challenges. Next
week is the artistic challenge, which is a study in the color red.
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