Some photos from Arizona

My sold-out workshop in Page, Arizona kicked into gear yesterday and it’s shaping up to be a great week. First, I got to meet everyone in the workshop and it looks like we’ve got a great group of people. Plus, we’ve got a veteran Arizona photographer (Leroy DeJolie) co-leading with me, and he whet our appetites last night with a phenomenal slideshow of what’s to come this week. I got here a little early so my buddy, Barney Streit, and I went out for a sunrise shoot. Here are the results (click here for a larger version):
Shot at Glen Canyon with a Nikon D200 and 70-200 VR lens (all the way out at 200). The foreground wasn’t anything spectacular so I put the zoom lens on. Used my Really Right Stuff BH-55 ball head for the first time and I LOVE IT! I can’t believe it took me this long to get one (well, they’re a bit pricey so I can believe it, but it is worth every penny and it lives up to its reputation). I processed this in Lightroom with a small exposure adjustment. I also pushed up the Blacks slider to enhance the detail. I adjusted the Clarity slider as well as increased the Vibrance. Finally, I went to the HSL panel and pumped up the blue saturation a bit for the water and sky. Check out the next post for another photo.

Another Arizona Photo

Here’s (click here for a larger version) another photo from my Arizona trip. After shooting in one direction, I turned around to where the sun was rising from and saw this photo. I’d love to say I planned it, but I TOTALLY got lucky and caught it at the right moment. This one was shot with the D-200, a 17-55 2.8 lens (f/8, 1/500 sec). Again, I was on a tripod using the BH-55. My Hoodman loupe really came in handy here because the lighting made it kind of difficult to see my LCD. Scroll down for one more.

One more photo from Arizona

Here’s (click here for a larger version) one more from the sunrise shoot. Basically, when the sun comes up and the good light is gone, what’s there left to do? Naturally, you reach for your buddy’s 10.5 Fish Eye lens and start shooting right at the sun. Embrace it… become one with the sun and all of its LCD blinking, overexposed glory. This one was shot with the 10.5 Fish Eye at f/11 at 1/125 sec. Really basic stuff in Lightroom was done (Exposure, Blacks, Clarity, and Vibrance). However, the Recovery slider (pushed to 75) worked like a champ here to bring back some of the blown out detail in the highlights. That’s it for now. I’ll post more as I get ‘em.

Wednesday Inspiration – Elizabeth Carmel

Elizabeth Carmel is a Sierra-based photographer specializing in unique, expressive landscapes and “waterscapes”. There’s three reasons to visit her site. 1) Her photography rocks! 2) She’s got a really cool photo blog with some interesting insights 3) Her photography REALLY rocks! Check out Elizabeth’s site here at (www.elizabethcarmel.com). (Photo credit: Elizabeth Carmel)

Monday Presets

I’m really excited to introduce a new feature on this site. Presets (or downloads or whatever you want to call them)! See…I realized I had an extra 15 minutes each week that was being wasted, so I decided to give myself one more item on the weekly “to-do” list. All joking aside, I just think presets are cool. They fit into my favorite 3 categories:
1) They’re easy to use.
2) They save me time
3) They’re fun
This week’s first free preset bundle deals with edge darkening. These are presets that I actually use (on almost every photo I process) each day. When you install them you’ll see there’s 3 versions (Edge Darken light, medium, and dark). I very quickly click on each one after I’m done developing the photo (white balance, tone and color correction) and see which one looks best. That’s it. So make sure you stop by each week to check out the free download They’ll include everything from Develop presets (like this week’s preset), to Web Galleries, Slideshow, and Print presets. Enjoy!
Click here to download the presets. To install them, first unzip the ZIP file. Go to the Develop module. Then Right-click the User Presets item in the Presets panel and choose Import. Repeat this for each of the 3 presets.

Friday Tip – Split Tone Color Preview

Here’s why today’s tip is so important. When you use the Split Tone panel you pretty much have to guess at which color you’re dragging the Hue slider to (unless you have super-secret microscopic vision and can tell by the small preview). So you would normally have to drag the Hue slider and then drag the Saturation slider to see the color. But, as you can imagine, Lightroom is full of tiny hidden shortcuts that, well, do their best to stay tiny and hidden. Here’s one: If you hold down the Alt/Option key as you drag the Hue slider, Lightroom gives you a preview of what the image would look like if the Saturation were at 100%. Now… the preview will look absolutely horrible since you rarely want a 100% saturation setting but at least you can get an idea for the color you’re dragging to instead of guessing. Sweet huh? Have a great weekend!

Wednesday Inspiration – Erik Almas Photography

You guys are going to love this week’s inspirational link. His name is Erik Almas and I just spend about 20 minutes going through his photos. They’re amazing from every aspect (lighting, composition, subject matter). What I like most about his work is that the subject (usually a person) and their surroundings (usually some awesome scenic place) are both wonderfully thought out. Each subject fits their surrounding and each of their surroundings makes total sense when you see the person in the photo. So take a few minutes and check out Erik’s work and hopefully it’ll inspire you as it did me. Visit Erik Almas Photography here. (photo credit: Erik Almas)

Video – Surreal Edgy Effect

This week I’m changing it up a little and showing a creative technique that I’ve seen become very popular lately. It’s something that you’d typically create in Photoshop (and maybe with a plug-in) but you can come up with some very cool results right here in Lightroom. It’s creative… it’s edgy… and it almost has a surreal quality to it. All that aside, I just think it looks cool on some photos so I decided to see how far I could push Lightroom toward creating the style. Have fun with it!

Click here to watch the video. (11 Mb)