With flash at Central Park Zoo.
Just remind me not to put the last two posts into the store. This one really gives me the creeps, esp. full frame where the little rodent seems to be smiling. shot in the dark bat room. This ain’t easy. If you’re at the C.P. zoo, give it a try.
No story for this other than the “true” story can’t be told because Neighbor ‘X’ wants to preserve his privacy.
I took this during one of the early lessons I was giving in Schurz Park – as a way of being prepared for what was about to happen. Have a friend drop an object, in this case a leaf, and see if you can focus and capture the object.
I was invited to photograph a conference which happened to be on the 30th floor of a building on the west side. This was two years ago. I was able to do a lot of shooting from one of the balconies. I liked the compositions, but never thought they were interesting in b&w. This was done with a custom Lightroom preset based on the bleach bypass preset and is pretty typical of the look that I find soothing – where the colors are present but not distracting. This look goes back to darkroom color printing with the bleach bypass technique, and it translates well into digital shots. It also works well with tungsten lights — which I’ll post later.
So as the color experiments come to a close, I have found three ways of dealing with color images.
The bleach bypass method seems so far to work well with most images.
Actually painting the images is also interesting – though very time-consuming.
And for my infrared shots, and for some color shots, split toning works, though for infrared it’s necessary to do the switch red and blue channels in Photoshop. There is a good tutorial about this technique on the Lifepixel.com site (which is where my camera was modified for infrared). I chose the general infrared modification (72nm) which is really only good for giving the blue sky effect.
First. Anyone know where I can get a profile for Epson 7800 and epson exhibition f paper for the Mac.
Frankly I searched the epson site forever and no could find one.
I didn’t need it when doing b&w since I used the epson advanced b&w driver. But yes a profile for my paper / printer would be useful now.
Thanks in advance.
Okay -/-
After a ton of futzing around with different color styles, I did stumble across a preset that works pretty well as a starting point for straight color shots (i.e. not the infrared stuff).
I hadn’t heard of it before, but it’s called Bleach Bypass. It’s the first preset that seems to give subdued, but not completely desaturated tints to the major portions of the print. At least (again salt to taste) in that I can use it for a nature shot as well as a street shot.
I pulled out about 150 shots that seemed to have color potential (half done with the selecting process) and I plan to test this with those shots. As a general rule, if I didn’t like the shot in b&w – I’m not going to be very impressed with it in color.
Yes. I liked this in b&w but not enough to print it. In color, it has a different presence. In other words, sometimes, information is available in the color shot that helps give separation to different parts of the picture, the way we would put a light over everyone’s head when filmming to give separation from the background.
Other times, the b&w image is actually achieves more separation.
Color Bleach Bypass, Lightroom 3.x Preset without any tweaking
Amazing what you see, just going on your merry way in NYC. This turned into a big dispute about what exactly, I never was sure. But the woman was certain that she had been cheated. And the girl behind the register didn’t know what to do about it.
Manager arrives, and replaces what looks to me like one bag of small french fries with a duplicate bag of french fries and the woman walks away somewhat satisfied. I thought for a moment the cops were going to have to be called to settle things.
Close up… this is just a bunch of Seurat-like dots. In other words – just about everything here has been painted over in Photoshop. Ah – thank you Wacom.
Here’s what the original looked like – straight out of the IR camera.
