Moments in Time Photography
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This calendula blossom opened up early in the morning, which is supposed to be a sign of good weather.
Calendula blossom with rain drops.
For some strange reason it started raining as I was taking the picture (you can see some rain drops). It is good that I found the information about the “sign of good weather” on wikipedia because that means it must be true. 🙂
I was invited to be the official photographer covering the performance of a childrens musical. Over 130 kids performed on stage – everything else was a huge volunteer effort by the parents. It was great fun to see how enthusiastic the kids (aged 6 to about 19) were and how much fun they were having on stage!
It was also a great learning experience, since this was the first time I have done any stage photography. Out of over 1000 exposures I got about 500 that are decent and 150 that I consider good. The main lesson here: consider depth of field. It will not do to shoot several people with an aperture of f2.8 if they are not exactly the same distance from the camera.
The second lesson is that I need to sort out the model releases before, not after, the event. Now I am identifying the performers and contacting them or their parents directly for permission to publish – it would have been much easier if we had sorted this out when the kids signed up to participate.
Here are “Wolfgang 4” (Mozart as a man) with his mother:
Performers 'Wolfgang 4' and 'Mozarts Mother'.
As I get the releases straightened out, I will post more images of the event. Subscribe the RSS feed to be notified of updates.
In the last post I showed a picture of a marmelade fly on a yellow flower. I would like to revisit that picture to show how much an image can change depending on how – and with which tools – it is processed.
The original image was captured in RAW format. I then processed it in Adobe Lightroom 2. The result is this:
Marmelade Flies on a Yellow Flower processed in Adobe Lightroom 2
While I was reasonably happy with the image, I had to do some testing in Capture One Pro and decided to see if I could do better. I have long thought that Capture Ones color rendition is much better than Lightrooms. But judge for yourself:
Marmelade Flies on a Yellow Flower processed in Capture One Pro and Photoshop
Quite a difference, don’t you think? The first rendition looks almost like a painting while the second is so real you can almost touch it.
So how was it done?
I first opened the file in Capture One and set the exposure so that none of the color channels would clip. This part is identical to what I did in Lightroom. Note that the yellows are a bit darker in the C1 rendition than in LR. I then exported a 16-bit TIFF file to Photoshop from C1.
In Photoshop I created a mask to darken the green part to the left of the flower using a curve. A second mark darkened the bright leaf to the left and below the marmelade fly. Then I removed some spots from the yellow petals which were really there (i.e. not dust on the lens or sensor) but which I did not like. All of these steps are identical to what I did in Lightroom except that I did not darken the single bright leaf in LR.
I then added a watermark copyright note and reduced the size of the file. Finally, I used Pixel Genius PhotoKit Sharpener for output sharpening. All of this is fully automatic during the Lightroom export.
In total I spent about five minutes in Lightroom to get a decent image. I spent about half an hour in Capture One and Photoshop to get an excellent image. There is clearly a trade-off time for quality here.
That is why I usually perform all my culling, keywording, and rough editing in LR. When I have identified the handful of images with real potential I spend more time on them in C1 and PS. Now if only I could take the LR settings and use them in C1 so that, for example, I do not have to re-crop …
It seems that we did not have a marmelade fly image for about … 2 days now, so I think it is time for another :-):
Marmelade Flies on a Yellow Flower
You might also want to enjoy the beautiful texture of those wonderful yellow flower petals. I did not play with the saturation, the color really is that lush!
As I said a few days ago, the anemones are currently popping up like crazy. It seems they are not the only ones, we’ve also got a huge number of mamelade flies:
Marmelade Flies on an Anemone Flower
As you can tell, a marmelade fly (Episyrphus balteatus) looks a bit like a solitary wasp, but it really is a hoverfly and therefore quite harmless. Harmless to everyone and everything but aphids (plant lice or greenflies), that is, which the larvae (would that be marmelade larvae?) are fond of eating.
For this reason the marmelade flies are quite welcome in my garden and I like to have them come around. In case you are wondering, they do not seem to have the habit of becoming annoying like their house fly cousins.
These two, incidentally, are both males. You can tell this because the eyes touch at the top of the head, which is unique to the males. Isn’t it cool what you can find out if you take an interest in what shows up in your pictures? 😉
