Photo of the Day
I thought that this would make a good picture of the day because it has a couple of the more famous New York landmarks in it. We took a boat tour of New York on our trip, and I really though I had a great idea for a shot as we were coming up on the Brooklyn Bridge. I got the shot that I wanted, and I still like the idea over four years later. Getting both the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building in the shot was not the most out of the box thought, but for me at the time it was pretty good. I think what I like most about the shot is the fact that this could have been taken at almost anytime in the last few year. There is not real modern looking building in the shot. There are subtle tells that it was fairly recent, but for the most part it really is kind of an ageless shot. I would really like another chance to photograph New York as I wonder now what my eye would catch. I was in auto mode most of the time just shooting landmarks. I think that things would be a bit different now.
Technical Data
What a difference a little knowledge makes. I took this picture in 2008 on our New York trip with great expectations. I didn’t have anything to view the pictures on after I took them so I kept shooting the entire trip without seeing the results on anything else except my LCD screen on my camera. When I saw the shots I realized that I had a very dirty sensor that I never noticed because it would be hidden in my sports shots. What I saw was a sky that was littered with spots. For that reason most of these pictures had been hidden away for quite some time. With the cloning tool in Lightroom I was able to do a quick and dirty job of getting rid of those spots. It really did the job very well, and I am glad that I am able to show a couple of these shots that at the time I thought were lost.
To edit this shot past the spot healing I just used one of the free Matt Kloskowski presets that I have been using way too much lately. I love the desaturated look though. I used the heavy preset and then adjusted the sliders to my taste. I like the look, and it really brings out the texture in the bridge.
Black Friday Deal
I normally would never pump up a product on here, but today I saw on a couple of sites that Amazon.com has the Adobe Photoshop Elements Premiere package on sale for $70. You can’t even buy the stripped down version of the program for that in most places. I have still been using Elements 9 so this was an easy pickup for me. I know that I need to upgrade to CS6 someday, but for now Elements does the things that I need it to. I could have used the spot healing tool in CS6 to edit out the spots much easier, but Lightroom was not too bad to use. I will play around with both programs a bit coming up, and I am sure that you will hear what I think about them in the near future.
Dave Wegiel Photography 