Q&A….Can you show more before and afters?

I had lots and lots of questions after the last before and after post.  Questions of how to do this and how to do that.  I will get to all of them I promise through various posts using an image that I can show the most techniques with.

Monday night after 3 boot camp workouts and 7K run I was a wee bit tired.  If the wee bit definition is the point of clasping where I stand, that was how I felt.  And for some odd reason I agreed to ”walk” to the shoppette and take back the movies.  This story has a point I promise…We walked outside and saw the most beautiful colors ever in the sky as the sun was setting.  Which I knew was going to happen because it was such a clear day.  I normally always have my camera, but this time (thanks to John) my arms could barely hold up my hands much less the camera.

So I run back up stairs to get the camera and off we went..trying to chase the sunset..M and Tony yelling back at me to hurry hurry…faster faster…So plan B sets in…Tony gets the camera and off he goes to catch the sunset….So these pictures were taken by him…He took them so I have no idea what he was thinking the final image would be..but these are my interruption of the image. And what I did for post processing.

Here is the first image.  I immediatlly thought too much stuff was happening.  My eye went all over the place.  So I changed the composition by cropping at the bottom with all the buildings.  Then I simply bumped up the curves just a bit. And that was it.

Canon 5D   f-stop 1.2      1/30    ISO320  50mm

You can see how just removing a bit of the buildings brings order to the image.  The really really shiny light allows you eye to focus back on the sky.  In the original image I did not like the light but when cropped the image the shine worked.

This next image I did the exact same thing.  I felt there was too much going on.  I wanted to focus on the moon.  Then I bumped up my curves again and that was it.

Canon 5D     f-stop 1.6   1/10   ISO125     50mm

My advice is to not have too many distractions in your image.   Pick a subject and make sure everything else compliments the subject in the image.  To Tony’s credit he did scale the wall to get rid of alot of other distractions on the ground.  And I did have the 50mm on the camera…So there was no zoom…It is what it is..LOL!!

See you tomorrow!

Shelia