Friday, August 31, 2012

Photo Friday: Touching Up


Last Sunday, I led a group of Ottawa photographers through Centretown on a photo walk. They are all a great bunch of people who have a keen eye for the subtleties that make the world interesting. I think that you should all go to the Flickr page that we've set up to share our photos.

Go often, because I think that some of us are still adding photos.

One of my personal favourites that I shot was of two buildings on O'Connor street. If you've seen my photos from Wordless Wednesday, you've already seen it. I was standing near the Dominion-Chalmers United Church, looking north, when the natural contrast of the buildings caught my eye. The office tower in the background dominated the apartment building in the foreground; the simple striped pattern of its exterior was striking from the uniform balconies.


I shot this photo with my Nikon D80, with my 70-300mm lens set at 100mm; I used a shutter speed of 1/640 and an aperture of f/8.0. I also adjusted the EV to +0.33. The ISO was 640.

Is that enough technical jargon for you?

The photo, as it is displayed on the Flickr page, was touched up as I sat at the Mill Street Tweetup, after the walk. I downloaded the photo directly from my camera to my iPod, and then did some basic touching up with Snapseed.

But I wasn't entirely happy with the result. I didn't like the edge of the apartment building on the right-hand side of the photo. The buildings were a shade crooked.

And so I started again.

I went back to the original file, before any post-shooting edits, and went about touching it up again. This time, I did my editing on my laptop and used a photo-editing tool that I'm beta testing. I straightened the buildings and cropped away the unwanted bits of the apartment building. I adjusted the brightness and contrast, increased the vibrancy, and applied a colour fade correction tool.

Now, I'm happy with this shot.

What do you think?

Happy Friday!

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