‘Lone Tree’ | New Bern, NC
This is the tree that you may recognize from my Lawson Creek Park time lapse. I couldn’t help grabbing a few stills before I left. The lighting was really neat on the foreground and tree. In addition, water usually surrounds the tree but heavy wind had blown the tide out toward the sea leaving this shelly river floor exposed.
The shot: Nikon D90, Rokinon 8mm lens. 3 bracketed exposures. Middle and brightest exposures manually masked together in Photoshop using a Wacom Intuos 4 tablet. Darkest exposure discarded.
©2012 Zach Frailey
‘Sleeping Giant’ | Pittsburgh Zoo
*Update…A friend on Facebook informed me that this lion, named Juma, passed away last March at the age of 21. That deeply saddens me because that means this was the same guy that I saw each and every time I visited the zoo. I hope this image serves as a remembrance of him.*
Lately I have found myself really being drawn to a more ‘cinematic’ look in my post processing. I’m really liking a flatter, film-like finish. That’s what I was shooting for in this image by combining some Nik Viveza, Silver Efex and multiple texture layers in Photoshop. I finished it with a layer of about -50% contrast to flatten the image out. I then masked out a few portions of the lion and the foreground to bring back it’s contrasty look.
This technique is a work in progress.
Adobe Lightroom 4 Beta Test Drive
-updated January 13, 2011-
As most photographers know, on January 10, Adobe released the public beta version of the new Lightroom 4. Personally, I’m pretty new to the Lightroom game. The fist version I had even used was Lightroom 3 and at that, I’ve only really used it to convert RAW files to JPEG when processing portraits. And if you’ve followed my work for any amount of time, you realize that isn’t much. But in the past couple of months, I have really made it a point to try to do more processing in Lightroom and less in Photoshop- on everything. I have been quite happy with the outcome and am happy to say that I am spending less and less time in Photoshop. When I saw that Lightroom 4 Beta was available, I was excited to give it a try. Hopefully the next few paragraphs and photos can help to explain it a little. Note: the photos attached were edited entirely with Lightroom 4 Beta.
The first thing I noticed when opening Lightroom 4 Beta was that there were two new modules- ‘Book’ and ‘Map.’ Map (finally) allows you to geotag your photos in the Lightroom collections and they are then sorted on a map of the world. You can zoom in or out as far as you want to be as precise as you want in your locations. Simply drag and drop and your photos are tagged with the GPS coordinates of that location. Pretty neat.
‘Book’ simply gives you the layouts from Blurb.com inside Lightroom. Create your book and export directly to Blurb to print. Again, awesome.
As far as the ‘Develop’ module, things are the similar to before but at the same time, so much better. The ‘Fill Light’ and ‘Recovery’ sliders have been replaced with much more intuitive ‘Shadows’ and ‘Highlights’ sliders. They work so much better than the previous options and give a much more natural look when you have to crank them up. Another big thing I noticed was a much better Adjustment Brush. Maybe it’s just my mind playing tricks on me, but the brush seems so much more responsive and allows for much more subtle tweaks than the previous version. I hated using it in Lightroom 3, but in 4- I love it. In fact, I used it on almost all the photos I worked on. It will be a huge time saver in keeping me out of Photoshop.
For this image, I brought back detail in the window by lowering the exposure 1 stop with the Adjustment Brush. I was really pretty impressed with it.
I really gave the adjustment brush a workout on this image. Also, the ‘Shadows’ and ‘Highlights’ sliders did a great job of bringing out the detail in the foreground, house and sky.
I have also noticed much better ability to retain details when using the ‘Noise Reduction’ setting as well. At low levels of application, the Lightroom 3 reduction was fantastic, but lots of detail was lost at mid to high level application (to be expected). But with Lightroom 4, higher levels of application are fantastic.
On to one slight negative aspect that I came across. My presets didn’t work the same was as they did in Lightroom 3. I would imagine that the cause of this is the addition of the ‘Shadows’ and ‘Highlights’ sliders and the removal of the ‘Fill light’ and ‘Recovery.’ Some of the presets worked fine, but many were quite wonky. But I was able to notice a difference in all of them. I’m sure that if you’re big into presetting Lightroom, you will be able to tweak your settings to work just fine. Similarly, if you have paid settings, I’m sure the creators will supply an updated download to you.
In conclusion, I really like the changes made to Lightroom 4. It amazes me that improvements can be made to a product that seems so great to begin with. With just one shoot edited with Lightroom 4 beta, I’m sure that I’ll discover more that I like/dislike about it in the coming weeks. Look for updates to this post as I go on.
Content copyright 2012, Zach Frailey. Do not use without permission.
Weathering Storms | near Stonewall, NC
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This is the latest installment of my on-going ‘Abandoned NC’ project in which I am documenting rural abandonment primarily in Eastern NC. I came across this old boathouse near Stonewall, North Carolina. It’s hard to say how many storms this old structure has weathered over the years. I had seen it before but never had a chance to stop by and shoot it. I set out with the plan to add it to my project, but on the way it donned on me that it may not even be there anymore being that it is located in an area that was heavily impacted by Hurricane Irene in the summer. But, as I turned the corner, there she was. Standing there the same as always. It is amazing to me that things can sometimes be discarded as ‘useless’ or ‘junk’ but survive long beyond anyone’s expectations. That’s the essence of what I’m hoping to capture in this series; before these structures actually do succumb to Mother Nature, as they are certain to do someday.
Check out the series so far at: http://uprootedphotographer.500px.com/abandonednc/
The shot: Nikon D90, 18-105 VR lens. f/16, ISO 200. 3 exposures, merged in Nik HDR Efex Pro and finished in Photoshop CS4.
Leaning Right | New Bern, North Carolina
During an unseasonably warm morning, I was out and about running errands. Having my camera gear with me, I figured this was the perfect morning for an impromptu walk in the park. I headed over to Glenburnie Park, on the banks of the Neuse River, and began hiking around and snapping photos. As I reached the back corner of the park and got ready to head back toward the Jeep, I noticed how wonderfully the morning sun had back lit the canopy of leaves across the scene. I had to spend a bit of time working the scene because there was just so much to see. The leaves are the real star of the show here, but they have a fantastic supporting cast from the shadows, texture in the ground and of course, the leaning tree that is front and center.
The Shot: This photo took a particularly interesting turn in post processing, leading me to try new things and come out with great results from an unexpected place. After merging my exposures in HDR Efex Pro and doing my typical masking with the original exposures, I took the image through Silver Efex Pro. As you may or may not know, this program is used for making (amazing) black and white images. I ran the photo through High Structure with a yellow filter. This created a very bright black and white layer in Photoshop. Next, I set its blend mode to ‘Luminosity.’ Finally, I duplicated the original background layer and moved it to the top, masked out the tree trunks and other various portions of the photo and voila, brought out a ton of detail in the image. I’ll have to add this new method to my workflow!
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