Amami Superman Photography

Here's my first post of a photo that I didn't like at first, but after a bit of post editing, I thought I'd share it with you.

I upped the Vibrancy and Saturation and did a bit of Sharpening in Lightroom 2. This photo stuck out to me even though I didn't think it was that great. While passing over the different photos I took from this day, I kept coming back to this one. I suppose we all have our tastes.

The wall is covered in thick vines almost like shrubs. They trimmed the vines and made this interesting picture on the wall. The far left vines are a hand pointing to "パソコン" (pasokon).

I had last Wednesday off, but it was cold and windy and I didn't want to go out. It was so cold that it hailed for a few seconds. It usually doesn't get that cold here in Amami. So instead of going out, I sat in my wife's shop and snapped shots of people walking by. The originals weren't that great so I tried to think of something to do to them to make them seem a little more artistic. I cruised around the interwebs looking for ideas and I came across a few photos that isolated the subject by turning all the colors besides the subject to black and white. I thought this would be something cool to try.

After importing my photos to Lightroom 2, I selected the Edit In feature and brought them into Photoshop CS3. I then made a duplicate of the background. I selected the background copy and used the Desaturate feature to make it black and white. Next, I adjusted the Contrast and Brightness to the desired effect I wanted. After that, I made an opacity mask of the background copy and commenced to hide the subject revealing the color image underneath. Once I finished, I saved it and returned to Lightroom 2 to do a few more tweeks upping the blacks and giving them some vignettes. I thought they turned out pretty nice compared to the originals.

I wanted to show the originals also but I didn't want to just stick the originals into the post so I decided to do a little html work and make some mouse-over images. I hope you like them.

I've been trying to use Aperture Priority more to understand how it works. For the life of me, I don't understand why the camera chose 1/80 sec. The only thing I can think of is the Metering Mode was set to Spot and Jade was kind of dark in the shadows. Either way, this photo was blown out and I did some post editing to fix it up and I think it turned out OK. Oh, and the glare is off the cars in the parking lot just up the stairs.

I've never thought of taking a photo with the camera at an angle, but I've seen plenty of nice looking photos that have so I thought I would try and take a shot at it.

This photo was taken the day we went to see the cherry blossoms.