A Scenic World

I get inspiration from what I read, what I hear, what I see, what I think.Yesterday, inspiration abounded.

First, I read Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. Hidden within it are snippets from the revered Book of Bokonon, like this one:

Someday, someday, this crazy world will have to end,
And our God will take things back that He to us did lend.
And if, on that sad day, you want to scold our God,
Why go right ahead and scold Him. He’ll just smile and nod.

The I ran across this website (via yewknee) called “Before I Die, I Want to…” The idea was simple; photograph people and let them write what they want to do before they die on the bottom of the photo. Some of them were downright haunting…

Heady stuff, to say the least.

Then I read another book (I’m still in the “recovery” stage of my recent surgery). My book-swap friend had recommended The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst, and as he has nearly impeccable taste in literature, I dove right in and read the entire thing last night.

It was haunting and sad and deep and sad. It was the story of a man, a linguist, and his attempt to understand his beautiful, passionate, troubled wife. She was a maker of masks, and the idea that we never really know what’s behind a person’s mask - the face they present to the outside world, even to the people they love - ran through the novel, right up to its crushingly bittersweet end.

And so I gathered my inspiration up today, and I made this:

Those who know me in real life know that I have spent the past six weeks in varying degrees of pain. I had no idea what “pain management” meant, but I do now. Every day is a different struggle to find the will in myself to do things I took for granted before. During the worst times, I find solace wherever I can - I have become a consummate pill-swallower, my first-person-shooter skills have improved tremendously, and I have devoured the Olympics coverage.

And today - or rather tonight, after I left work early - I had the following pleasures, which distracted me (somewhat) from my daily agony:

• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. I read this in college, but no summary can really capture the beauty of each passage and the terrible, vivid story of the Joads.
• “Carry Me Home” by Polly Paulusma.
• Haagen-Dazs’ Vanilla Honey Bee Ice Cream. I’ve been following the plight of the honey bee for the past year or so, and when I found this ice cream at my store two days ago, I had to buy it. Honey ice cream! It’s divine.
• Clueless. God, it takes me back to high school. And Bravo played it twice tonight! I was inspired to put on heels :)

One of the Pentax forum members at dpreview asked me about the post-processing of some of my photos from northern Europe, and unfortunately I haven’t had time to make a detailed response.

Until now.

Hold on to your seats, fellas, because we’re going to take a wild ride through Mr. Adobe’s Lightroom Extravaganza!

Seriously, I’ve been trying to figure out a way to make my post-processing process a bit more universal. It’s straight-forward enough if you also use Lightroom, but how to make it transferable to users of Photoshop or Elements or GiMP? I took screenshots of the tonal curves and histograms this time; hopefully that helps. If you have any other ideas, please let me know!

Now, for the actual photos =)

Case Study #1: Fisherman on the River Meuse

Original:

I loved the framing of this one, but it definitely lacked punch as I shot it - not surprising, actually, since I have all my settings in-camera set to either 0 or negative values (saturation, contrast, etc. etc. ). I like to add all of that in post-processing.

For this one, I added almost all of the punch by adjusting the basic values.

Exposure: +.38
Recovery: 0
Fill Light: +31
Blacks: +57

Brightness: +32 (this actually decreases blackness, as Lightroom starts at a value of 50)
Contrast: +41 (from a Lightroom start value of +25)

Clarity: +17
Vibrance: +67
Saturation: -45

This gives us rather slight modifications, as evidenced here:

Next we have the Tonal Curve adjustments (”curves” in almost every other software). I made the following adjustments, all from start values of 0.

Highlights: +25
Lights: +12
Darks: -14
Shadows: -50

The tonal curve went from this:

to this:

and the photo looked like this afterwards:

We’re getting there…

Next I made some adjustments to the Hue/Saturation/Luminance as follows, all coming from a start value of 0:

Red:
Hue: 0
Saturation: -100
Luminance: 0

Orange:
Hue: +33
Saturation: -7
Luminance: 0

Yellow:
Hue: -12
Saturation: +100
Luminance: +100

Green:
Hue: 0
Saturation: -100
Luminance: +100

Aqua:
Hue: 0
Saturation: -100
Luminance:0

Blue:
Hue: 0
Saturation: -52
Luminance: +64

Purple:
Hue: 0
Saturation: -100
Luminance: 0

Magenta:
Hue: 0
Saturation: -100
Luminance: 0

The reds, purples, and magentas were desaturated fully because there was some chromatic aberration on the fishing pole, and as nothing important in the photo were those colors, I just did away with them.

The photo now looks like this:

Next, for the split toning. When I want a duotoned photo, I find its easiest to add by using split toning rather than adjusting the individual colors. In this case, I wanted yellowish-green highlights and blue shadows. In Lightroom, I chose a value of 60 for the hue of the highlight, with a saturation of 80. For the shadows, I chose 240 as the hue with a saturation of 85. To give you an idea:

I adjusted the balance between highlights and shadows to +17 (the highlights have more weight when it comes to the distribution of color), and the photo looks like this now:

The next category in Lightroom is Noise Reduction and Sharpening. I have a confessions: I never adjust these or even bother looking at them. So, moving on to the next:

Vignetting! My favorite!

Once again, Lightroom has a start value of 0 for the vignette amount.  Negative amounts refer to a dark vignette added; positive values add a white vignette. I added -88. The other adjustment you can make in Lightroom is to adjust the midpoint of the vignette - whether the vignettes starts from the middle of the photo or affects only the corners. For this, Lightroom’s start value is 50, which is a pretty standard vignette. At 0, the vignette encroaches to the very middle of the photo; the edges are entirely black and all shadow detail in the bridge is lost. At 100, the vignette just barely darkens the edges of the photo. I opted for a value of 100. Here’s what the photo looks like now:

And that’s actually the finished version!

The histogram, by the way, started out looking like this, which I think would generally be considered to be an acceptable histogram for the challenging contrasts in this photo:

to this:

which is basically an example of what a histogram should NOT look like. ;)

So how does this whole creative process work, anyway?As far as my self-portraits go, they can be put into two categories. The first category is spontaneous shots. These probably account for the majority. They occur when I’m really busy that day, or when I don’t have any ideas, or when I just see some good light somewhere and try to capitalize on it.

The second category is the planned shot. By far, these are my most popular photos. Some of them require far more set-up than others, but the one I took yesterday reflects how most of these planned shots work.

I wake up every morning and have a cup of coffee on my porch. I always have a pen and paper handy so I can write down anything that comes to mind, whether it’s a to-do list for the day, an idea for a project in the future, or my self-portrait for the day.

At the moment, I’m doing an Olympics-and-book theme (yeah, whatever, it helps me to have some structure to the project). So yesterday, I threw around some ideas on paper: “High Bar,” “(Track and) Field,” “Floor Exercise.” Since it was raining, I knew I would have to do an indoor shot, so “Floor Exercise” it was.

Next I sketched out how I wanted it to look. I don’t do this for all my shots, but I do it at least once a week, and these are the ones I usually execute best. Nothing fancy, of course, because I’m not an artist. Just something like this (this is the actual sketch):

Next I had to setup the shot. This involving moving a fair amount of furniture (a bench, my bedside table, my computer chair, and some random cords that usually run behind the bench). I’ve moved my entire bedroom around before for a shot before, but thankfully this one was minimal.

I lost my remote control in Germany, so I had to set the focus for the shot first. The book served as an excellent stand-in for me.

Next, all I had to do was insert myself. I started out wearing a floral print dress and wound up in white pants and white shirt when I saw how nicely the light was bouncing off the white. The exposure was a bit tricky - it took four shots with me changing settings in “Manual” mode to get it right (I almost never get a shot right the first time I try). Note how the reflection on the wall behind me was purely from the reflection:

And there you have it: the making of #47, which made the front page of Explore, yay!