Photo of the Day
When I finally landed in Pennsylvania I went down to pick up my bags at baggage claim. A normal process was interrupted by a very cool photo of a barn on the wall. I decided that even though it was a quick trip with nothing photography related on the agenda that I would photograph that barn. I really did not have any time to go out and find the barn. It was a busy weekend, but a stroke of luck helped me out. I volunteered to take my sister in law to the airport. On the way there we passed the barn on the highway. Through a little trial and error I found my way to it, and made my photo. I did not stay long on the site, but I was able to find the angle that I wanted. I am glad that I was able to find this barn because it is to be dismantled and moved to another site. It has been at the current site since 1872. I don’t know when I get back to this area, but I hope that I can see the barn again when it is finished.
Technical Data
Once again I have made a video that I will share below showing my process for processing this photo. I like this one because it is not very polished. You can see me struggle a bit to find the right way to show this barn. The light was crazy when I was on the site. The front of the barn was in shadow while the sun was setting in the background. With no clouds to diffuse the light it was coming in pretty harsh. The human eye can see this dynamic range of light, but the camera cannot record it. That is why I bracket knowing that I can make a photo that represents what I saw in person. On the site I bracketed at -2.5, 0, and +2.5. I usually only shoot in two stop increments, but I wanted a little more on each end to work with. In all reality this would have been a great time to make a 5 shot HDR. I fused the three photos in Photomatix 5, and then sent the 32 bit file into Lightroom to work on it there. You can then see in the video how I tried a few presets on it before finally settling on the HDR Look light by Matt Kloskowski. From there it was a long set of adjustments to get the shot where it is now. Instead of going through all of those I will just let you watch the video. When I first saw the photo I thought that it was too far gone. Thanks to a little processing though it is a very usable photo. The fun part about this photo is that I processed it on the plane on the way home in a little turbulence. It is nice to process on the way home if you can to get some of the work out of the way. This was a short flight though so the computer was not out very long. I sped the video up to 4x so that you didn’t have to sit through twelve minutes of editing.
Photo Sale
From now until Labor Day I have placed all of my prints on SmugMug on sale. If you enter the coupon code ‘summer’ when you check out it will knock off 50% of the price. After the long winter I wanted to do something special this summer. This sale was a good start. If you like the photo above simply click on the photo to be taken to my SmugMug site. If you just want to browse the site click here to be taken to the front page.
Dave Wegiel Photography 