Challenge 21 - Pre-dawn Old Town Alexandria VA

RocketMan · September 11, 2004

This first one is what It think is my best

colors are pretty true even the lamps, which in fact did have a bit of a green tint to them.

A gazebo across from the boat

Looking up King Street, this maybe a bit too blue

and finally a view inside a bar thru the window, liked this one because of the red lighting under the bar, tried to get a straight on shot but the window frame was in the way.

this last one took the most post processing work, had to mask the bright lights to bring out the detail in the middle of the line of bottles. Not too bad for having nothing more than Lview Pro to work with, which is actually not a bad program, though nothing like PS, it's certainly affordable and supports thing like curves, histograms, layers, masks, retouching etc.

Comments please on these as they are my first real night shotting attempt where I had even an inkling of what I was doing!:rofl

RM

snapapple · September 11, 2004

Great job...
Rocketman, this is great. (As Andy said, I have deleted your post to save room.) I like the first one a lot. But, I wouldn't discount the picture looking down the street. The blue could be reduced a little in post, I think. But, it's not bad. It has a nice feel to it. I like the perspective. You've done a great job in making sure the brights are not blown in all of them. The gazebo shot feels a little close. I want to see more context there. The bar shot is neat too. You got some detail in the dark shadows along with the bright light. I'm not the best at critique, but I think you did a fine job.

RocketMan · September 11, 2004

snapapple wrote:

Rocketman, this is great. You've done a great job in making sure the brights are not blown in all of them. The gazebo shot feels a little close. I want to see more context there.

I cropped the gazebo shot some because the building in the background had some lights that I thought distracted from the main subject and I wanted to shoot it from the side that had the fountain. Still have the uncropped version so I could try it a bit less cropped and see how that feels. I found that the masking in Lview Pro allows you to paint out parts so you can only have changes affect certain areas and not others so I just masked the bright lights and could then bring out the darker parts with the curves function. Thanks for the nice comments!

RM

lynnesite · September 11, 2004

RocketMan wrote:

I cropped the gazebo shot some because the building in the background had some lights that I thought distracted from the main subject and I wanted to shoot it from the side that had the fountain. Still have the uncropped version so I could try it a bit less cropped and see how that feels. I found that the masking in Lview Pro allows you to paint out parts so you can only have changes affect certain areas and not others so I just masked the bright lights and could then bring out the darker parts with the curves function. Thanks for the nice comments!

RM

like the shot, it has a bit of a horizon tilt to clockwise--do you have enough room in the original to rotate about 2 degrees or so counter-clockwise?

AltPro · September 11, 2004

RocketMan:

I think my favorite might be the one of King St... The BLue doesn't really trouble me so much in this one, but even so, if it troubles you I know that you can adjust it out somewhat in Photoshop.

Very nice first attempts at "Night Shots."

ginette

RocketMan · September 13, 2004

Thanks for all the comments. So what I have done is on the King-Street shot I reduced the blue ever so slightly and brought out a tad more light so the street is a little brighter in the forground as seen in this king-street-2

and in the gazebo shot I stepped back a bit and roatated the image by 1/2 a degree adn painted out a few of the backgrond lights that had bothered me in the orginal which is why I had crpped it so close, as seen here.

Hope this helps.

RM