Photo of the Day
I like to photograph and visit many places. For some reason I have been drawn to Presidential sites over the years. I guess I like to see how ordinary men rise to the greatest office in the land, and how they react once they get there. It is nice to see the history behind the man. I also like to photograph things to do with NASA. That may come from a class very early in my life where all we did was learn about the NASA program. Imagine my surprise when I first pulled up to the Gerald Ford Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan and saw an astronaut outside. I was in heaven. I took a few shots with my point and shoots the next few times, but something was always missing. I then bought a dSLR, and shortly after that I took this shot. I see a couple of composition issues that I would change now almost six years later, but overall I like the shot. Now I have a reason to go back so that I can get a couple more shots of this great looking building.
Technical Data
The first thing that I want to mention here is the fact that this was early on in my SLR days so I was still in auto mode. Luckily the camera knew how cool the lights on the building would look as stars so it chose f/18 for me. That left me hand holding at 1/20th of a second. For some reason that worked though, and I was able to make the picture.
For this shot I used the strong sports preset by Matt Kloskowski. It really got me very close to where I wanted to be. I then got rid of the vignette that is part of that preset completely. I just thought that it looked too rough here. From there I just tweaked the exposure and shadows to get it where I wanted it. Now I am using Lightroom on a very old jpeg so there is some noise in the process, but I like the end result enough to justify the noise. On the web you really won’t see the noise so I will make that trade.
Dave Wegiel Photography 