Path to the Clouds | New Bern, NC
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Happy first day of Spring everyone! With the way the weather has been in the Eastern US lately, it’s easy to forget that it was still technically Winter. I thought this shot of a beautiful pastel sunset behind the NC History Center would be a great way to ring in one of my favorite seasons.
The History Center, part of Tryon Palace, is one of my favorite places to shoot the sunset in New Bern. There are so many great foreground elements there, especially these boardwalks and railings. The plant life is also starting to bloom in the gardens there and I’m really looking forward to working that life into these shots!
The shot: Nikon D90, Rokinon 8mm f/3.5 lens. f/22, 1”, ISO-100. 3 exposures, tonemapped with Photomatix. All three exposures and the tonemapped file were manually masked together in Photoshop. Finished with Nik Color Efex ‘Glamour Glow’ filter and ‘Pro Contrast’ filter.
Spring is Springing | New Bern, North Carolina
One fun thing about really concentrating on shooting sunsets over the past year is being able to watch the seasons change as well as the sun’s path in the sky. A spot I like to get out to at least once a week is the boardwalk area behind the NC History Center in New Bern. It has been great watching the plant life go through its stages of growth, death and rebirth over the past year. Along with it, the arrival and departure of different birds is something to be noted as well. This week, I have noticed that some color is returning to the marshes. Leaves are starting to show on the trees and lily pads are staring to appear in the water.
Anatomy of a Pastel Sunset- This sunset, shot on February 29, was taken during one of my favorite conditions. Pastel sunsets are great, and I’ve found them to occur when there are low clouds on the horizon and high clouds throughout the sky. The low clouds seem to push the sun’s rays upward, while the high clouds diffuse the light and cast it over everything. With the blue sky showing through, everything takes a nice pastel hue.
The shot: Nikon D90, 8mm Rokinon lens. f/22, 1/10 second, ISO-200. Two exposures, manually blended.
February’s First Eve
Here’s a short video I shot on the night of February 1, 2012. I set out to shoot a timelapse of the sunset, but ended up with a ton of other footage. I put it all together to make a sort of visual narrative. I’m shaking off the video rust, you see, I haven’t done anything since I was in college and even then, I wasn’t shooting with DSLRs as I am now. As anything, it’s a learning process and I like to think each shoot gets a little better!
Shot on the boardwalk behind the North Carolina History Center in New Bern, North Carolina using a Nikon D90, Nikkor 50mm, Nikkor 18-105mm and Rokinon 8mm lenses.
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.
Nothin’ Like A Cold Dew | New Bern, NC
No, I’m not talking about an ice cold Mountain Dew, although I do feel myself having a bit of a craving now… On this fall morning, downtown New Bern was under a thick, wet, humid fog. I had set out before it was light out in order to capture a sunset, but the before mentioned fog kind of ruined that plan. As the sun came up and it lightened up a bit, I was able to grab a few shots of the fog bathed boats in the marina that I really liked. I then walked over to the North Carolina History Center to try to shoot the waterfront from that angle. After a few not-so-exciting shots there, I was getting my gear packed up when I noticed the tall grass that usually goes overlooked. It was covered in little droplets of water and was bending under the weight of the water drops. It looked so neat to me that I got my gear back up and set up to shoot some macros. I don’t do a whole lot of macro photography, but sometimes it’s nice to change things up a bit! Hope you enjoy the little change-up for today.
The shot: Nikon D90, 18-105mm VR Nikkor lens shot @ 105mm. Tripod held, remote fired. 3 exposures blended in Photomatix Pro, finished in Photoshop CS4 with various layer masks bringing back original exposures.
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