While preparing yesterday’s post, summarizing year 2011, I did a lot of cleaning on the blog, checking tags and categories and things. It made me jump to the least expected posts, sometimes quite old. I looked at this image from summer 2008, and I had some ideas how I would process it differently now. It probably is an evidence of not only how far I came in post-processing, but also how my esthetic changed. Although I still can appreciate contrast between light and shadow in my photographs, I prefer to see detail in the main subject.

To achieve that effect, I went to original image and discovered the Exposure was slightly brought down. I returned it to the original level and opened the image in Photoshop to try one-image tone-mapping. Did I generate a lot of digital noise doing that? Sure I did, but luckily I was also able to clean it up at the end. But I not only opened the shadow in which the church was hiding. I also exposed the warm setting sun rays on the side of the church, and let them contrast with blue light from shadows on the other side, the one facing the viewer. Unfortunately, the HDR treatment exposed a busy foreground, with many street signs and small side walk construction area, previously hiding in the dark. While still in Photoshop, I cleaned them and saved image back to Lightroom for finishing touches. At this point, all was left to do was to boost contrast, add a bit of vignette, and done.

I would love to her from you, if you find the Before & After series useful. My idea behind them is to show you, how image can be improved with your increasing post-processing skills. I am not giving you the ready recipes, rather I am showing some concepts to take back to your images taken years ago, at which you just look and wonder – “how could I let it be like this?”. But if you feel like more detailed technique explanations would be in order, let me know!

I have a side note to todays post. I wanted to share with you a non-photographic resource. If you would like to learn more about effective blogging from an expert in the area, check out “31 days to Build a Better Blog”. It is an e-book written by Darren Rowse. I have recently purchased it, read over holidays and found extremely inspiring. If you feel like this blog go re-energized, its the effect of the ideas I found in the “31DBBB”. If you would llike to do something with your blog, use the code FWOB33 at checkout and you will get “31DBBB” for just $19.99. But you have to decide by Wednesday, January 11, 2012.

The links in this post are affiliate links. I was also provided a free review copy of the e-book. See details of our affiliate policy here.

Most of people do not put much thought into those decorations and end up going overboard, so it is not tasty anymore anyway. I was wondering for a while how to photograph the holiday decorations to retain some of the atmosphere but not overload the frame (and a sensor) with too many colors and brightness. And driving from holiday shopping one evening last week I got an idea.

In this part of the country, almost all new developments are build around a small artificial pond. It always fascinate me, but this time it actually came in handy. The lights create abstract patterns of color, and freezing water on late winter night changes the texture through the image. My favorite is below.

Happy Holidays, everybody!

This panorama is a view of Mississippi in Minneapolis, Minnesota from the top of Mill City Museum. You can see St. Anthony’s falls, dam, remnants of the water intakes for multiple mills, railroad bridge now used as pedestrian mall, Pillsbury mill on the other side. It is also the example of midday photograph which works, without HDR and other tricks. It is a set of single exposures, merged together in Photoshop.

Click on any of them to see larger version, it will also allow you to browse through gallery.

I read about it for the first time in the “Inspired eye III” by David DuChemin, where it was even illustrated with a spread of those early tries leading ultimately to the finished image, matching photographer’s intent. This idea is also in David DuChemin’s newest book, “Photographically speaking”.

Most of my picture taking is snapping. I look around for scenes drawing my attention- by shape, color, texture. Mostly color, color contrast is my favorite subject. And then I just record what I see. Hardly ever would I spend more time on it, sketching. But it happend a few times, and I liked the results.

In a sense, my summer spent photographing wild flowers I planted in front of my house this year was working the subject. But the truth is, the changes in my flower bed were so quick, that every evening I was coming to something different. Another example where I really took time with the subject was previous year, where I had probably close to an hour, waiting for my ride, to photograph this modern fountain in the downtown Rybnik. Water fascinates me, and the shape of the fountain was just perfect for the abstract. I came back with over 130 images. I think I showed some of my favorites from the day (check posts here and here), but there are many more. But here is few more- from overview to the abstracts. There were two colors dominating the images, so I decided to use only those two colors and created a duotone (for Lightroom suers, Highlights settings are 171,7 and for Shadows 41,36). Click on any image, to see the larger version and scroll through gallery.

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