The Best Camera is the One That You Have With You

I don’t remember where I first heard this to attribute it, but I have heard this a lot over the last couple of years. With all of the technological advances and great cameras out there you have to have one with you to make the shot. I did not take my 5D Mark III to the lake this past weekend, but I did have my new Canon Powershot G16 with me. A sunset shot without the boat would have been a great one to try the new Lee Big Stopper on. I have a bag ready to go with the Big Stopper in it, but of course I left it at home. With no dSLR and no tripod I had to rely on the G16 handheld to make this image. I went to get the camera to just see what the sunset would look like when this boat left from the house next door to us. I think that it added to the foreground just enough to make this an interesting picture. Last Saturday I wrote up a small review on the G16 that you can find here.

Editing the Photo in Lightroom 5

For this photo I had a little work to do. To start off I used the blue-yellow polarizer preset for Lightroom 5 by James Brandon. From there I went to work to make this image look as good as the real sight was. The camera cannot see all of the range of light that our eye sees. That is where you need to find the middle ground while making the exposure, and then use your post processing to bring out all of the detail that was there at the time. This would have been a great time to test the HDR features in the G16, but the boat was moving too fast for that. The image really had a light and a dark side. To make the sunset side of the image look good I had to have a dark left side of the image. To fix this I used the graduated filter in Lightroom and moved it in from the right side of the photo. I then increased the exposure of that side by itself. The graduated filter tool is one that I don’t use often enough. It really helped this photo out. I then lightened the boat up a bit using the brush tool, and then exported the photo to SmugMug. There was a little work done here, but for the most part it was a very easy edit.

Photo Sale!

This image and all of my others on my website here are now 50% off until Labor Day. I thought that after the long winter that we endured a photo sale was in order. If you like the photo above just click on it, and you will be taken directly to the image on SmugMug. If you just want to browse my online portfolio you can click on the link below. At the checkout enter the code ‘summer’ to get 50% off of my images.

50% Off