Thursday, June 2, 2011

Trees and a Plane

As I previously stated, one of my main goals this year is to finally learn how to do some photo editing. (I would say master photo editing, but it's already June, so that is just not going to happen.) So today, I am finally submitting a photo to Shoot and Edit run by Ashley Sisk at Ramblings and Photos. Not only is Ashley a really sweet girl and great photographer, she is a great photo editor and really generous with her knowledge. I know this because I always look at her blog and think, "I should really sit down and try her awesome instructions" and then I usually turn on the t.v. So you can see why I will not be mastering photo editing this year. But if you have any interest in learning about photo editing, you really should check out her blog.

This week's theme is Looking Up, and I think my photo fits in well. I took this photo while at the Mets' home opener.

This is the straight of of the camera shot (SOOC). It is completely unedited, except converted from Raw to a JPEG and I think I accidentally sharpened it a little when I exported it to Flickr.

Mets-Opening Day 2011 (1 of 1)

You can see it was pretty dark, although it wasn't really underexposed. The weather was awful that day and the sky was really pretty dark, so the photo is actually pretty realistic.

Working with Lightroom 3, I increased the brightness to 67, exposure to .78, black clipping to 13, light tones to 23, and highlights to 6, and I decreased the dark tones to -26 and shadow tones to -26. I also did luminance smoothing to 28. (Do I sound like I know what I am talking about? I really just fiddled with the sliders until the photo looked better to me.)

And here is the final result.

Mets-Opening Day 2011 (17 of 17)


As for the trees, I took this photo at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. I liked how the blossoms were falling off the trees and they looked like rain. By the way, I have a special fondness for these trees because my husband and I had our wedding reception at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens and had some of our wedding photos taken under these trees.

Brooklyn Botanic Gardens (1 of 1)

I am submitting this photo to Shutter Love Tuesdays at the Trendy Treehouse (Trees)and The Five Subject Notebook's Photo Challenge (Happy).





ShutterLoveTuesdays
Posted by Barbara at 8:00 PM

6 comments:

  1. Ashley SiskJune 2, 2011 at 8:44 PM

    Your first paragraph cracked me up - I watch tv and edit. :) I'm just loving the plane shot in general. I don't think my plane shots are ever that good! Great job.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousJune 2, 2011 at 10:03 PM

    I love how you captured the falling petals!

    I'm also quite impressed with the plane shot - what focal length were you using?

    ReplyDelete
  3. BarbaraJune 2, 2011 at 10:14 PM

    Thank you.

    @Withoutadornment, Lightroom is telling me that I took it at 55mm. I know I was using my 55-250 lens. The planes do fly pretty low in that area.

    ReplyDelete
  4. KalaJune 3, 2011 at 5:25 AM

    Beautiful capture of the falling petals!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Rosie@leavesnbloomJune 4, 2011 at 3:06 AM

    LOl I sit with my laptop editing with the tv on aswell. That plane was certainly flying quite low we normally have low flying tornadoes here but they move so fast it's hard to even find them in the sky. You did a great job in lightroom in lightening the sky. Have you tried some of the presets in the left hand side column of lightroom?

    ReplyDelete
  6. CedarJune 4, 2011 at 10:32 PM

    Very nice edit, and I love the picture of the trees raining blossoms!

    ReplyDelete

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