For our first project, we picked two subjects to shoot, I chose the red berries and a light post near my house. I played around with the settings on my camera while shooting, as well as trying out different settings in Lightroom to edit my pictures. These are my favorite five pictures of my subjects.
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Dangling Below |
This is my favorite pictures I took of the berries because of the way the sky contrasts with the leaves. I also liked that the berries were very sharp, and the background was softer. I didn't do as much editing with this picture as I did with others, but I felt that it didn't need very much editing to get it to look the way I wanted. I started out by changing my camera settings to super-vivid, which helped me to achieve the brightness that I wanted to capture. From there, I heightened the contrast in Lightroom to make the sky brighter. I also changed the hue and saturation of the red in the berries to get them to contrast and stand out against the green of the leaves. Lastly, I added a very slight vignette to darken the edges of the image, and to emphasize that the focus of the picture is the berries.
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Interlocked |
I chose this picture not because of a contrast in color, but the contrast of something natural to something man-made. To make this contrast even more prominent, I darkened the background and saturated the berries. In addition to darkening the background and brightening the berries, I sharpened the picture and increased the clarity to accentuate the texture of the metal chain. I also added a blue hue to make the metal appear colder, and increased the recovery to darken some of the highlights, especially in the background.
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Things Are Looking Up |
This is one of my favorite photos of the five that I shot because of the angle. I used the super-vivid preset on my camera, as well as adding the ‘Color Creative - Yesteryear 2’ preset in Lightroom. In Lightroom, I also changed the hues and saturation of the picture to make the light post have a purple tinge, to darken the blue of the sky, and to accentuate the clouds in the background. I also sharpened the paint of the numbering on the post. I was sure to make the clouds stand out against the blue in a way so that they look illuminated. In addition to these edits, I also boosted the recovery, clarity, vibrance, and sharpened the image a little. I like this photo not only because of the angle, but also because I like the purple-blue hues and the vividness of the post and the sky.
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Intricately Etched |
The sharpness of the leaf's pattern is the original reason I was drawn to this photo, and the more I edited it, the more I began to like it. I used the color swap preset on my camera when I took the picture that muted the color in the background, but when I was editing in Lightroom I decided to make it black and white. I used the preset ‘B&W Creative - Look 3’, and made the black in the photo deeper. Next, I sharpened the leaf to make it more defined and added a dark vignette under the 'Paint Overlay' style. I wanted to do this after looking at my inspiration photo I had posted on my blog. It was a photo by Michael Kenna that had heavy vignetting, as many of his pictures do. With this photo, I tried to do something very similar by making it black and white and adding a vignette.
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Fall Flowers |
This is my favorite photo of the five that I chose because I love the fall colors. When I took this picture, I didn’t use a camera preset, and the background was blurred. When I got into Lightroom, I added the preset ‘Color Creative - Yesteryear 2’ and the colors became much more vibrant. I sharpened the picture because I wanted the foreground to be sharper, but sharpening also gave the background much more depth. After sharpening, the tree and leaves in the background look like they have been eaten away, and when I saturated the colors in the background, it made it seem like they glittered. To heighten this effect even more, I increased the exposure, clarity, vibrance, brightness, and recovery.