Cairo in Motion

In February 2015 (yes, I'm just getting around to editing the photos) my husband and I took a weekend trip to Cairo. The city was incredibly striking, and the mosques very different from what I had imagined, my main experience with mosques being based on Istanbul. The colors of the city were very earthy, particularly in the golden evening sun, the mosques looked almost as if they were constructed from sun-baked clay.

For the bulk of our trip, we ended up hiring a private car with a driver for several reasons: many of the areas are not very walkable, the distance between sights can be quite lengthy, we had a very limited time and long list of sights to see, and private car hire is remarkably affordable. The great thing about this approach is we were able to see quite a bit of the city. The downside is that much of it was in the form of landscapes passing by at high speed. But, of course, the joy of digital is that you can experiment a bit with no real associated costs (I'm looking at you, film!). So, I pressed my camera against the glass of the car, and, when feeling especially bold, I even secured my wrist strap and took some shots with the windows rolled down. As you might imagine, I ended up with a lot of rubbish, like this photo with a lovely reflection of my fingers in the window:

But, in spite of some blurry foregrounds, I think several of the shots came out surprisingly well all things considered:

In addition to adventures by car, no cliched visit to Cairo would be complete without a trip around the Great Pyramids of Giza on the back of a camel. Suffice it to say, I've also acquired the (limited) ability to take photos whilst being jostled along on the back of a growling camel (and occasionally grasping the pommel of the saddle for dear life). Again, I ended up with lots of rubbish, but also got a few shots I think work:

Long Time Gone

For those of you still out there who have been wondering, I haven't become Amish or signed on for a one-way ticket to Mars. I'm afraid I have a far less interesting explanation for my hiatus from the wonderful world of blogging. I simply haven't had much time to devote to photography lately. At any rate, thanks to those who are still following! I'm just settling in from my big move from Alaska to England, so hopefully my posts will be a little less sporadic.

I'm afraid my time for editing has been minimal, but I did manage to get a few submissions into the Guardian newspaper's monthly Been There travel photo competition, and placed among the finalists for the month of March with a photo of Northwestern Glacier in Alaska. Beyond that, I'm still just trying to make it through the mountain of photos from my trips this last year! Below are a few photos from Berlin, but stay tuned for more from Heidelberg, Dresden, Bruges, Paris, Cologne, Vienna, Istanbul, Florence, Venice, Seward, and Anchorage...

One fun Lightroom tool I've been fiddling with lately is the sliding Clarity bar, which is under Presence on the Develop tab. Cranking it all the way to 100 creates a stark contrast which sharply defines the lines in the photo, while pushing it down to the opposite extreme (-100) creates a soft, fuzzy glow, much like a close-up filter. I don't usually use the extreme setting for most tools, but every once in awhile, approaching the extreme setting can create interesting results. I have a few examples below--do you have a preference? The first photo in the High and Low Clarity groups is the same--just with a different treatment.



High Clarity (+85 to +100)

Berliner Dom

Anchorage, Alaska

Exit Glacier, Alaska

Anchorage, Alaska

Anchorage, Alaska

Low Clarity (-85 to -100)

Berliner Dom

Berliner Dom

Seward, Alaska

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

Berliner Dom

My Latest Gig

I am finally back from my whirlwind adventure (more on that soon), and one of my first tasks upon my return was to shoot some portraits for a friend. She was particularly interested in resume photos, but we also had some fun doing more relaxed photos outdoors. The idea of a resume photo was a new concept to me--as I've applied primarily for jobs in the U.S., I've never been expected to submit a photo with a job application. Obviously the idea is to select a photo which is professional, but hopefully also conveys a bit of your personality. In order to make sure that I shot at least a few that would serve the purpose, I shot a wide variety of photos, ranging from extremely serious to happy.

In addition to shooting several hundred photos in different settings, with different clothing and hairstyles, and featuring different expressions, I also applied a variety of editing techniques (black and white, sepia tone, vignetting) to add variety and really make the photos stand out from the pack. I did the majority of my editing in Adobe Lightroom 4--I'm using the free 30 day trial, and trying to get a feel for how the program differs from (and is similar to) Lightroom 3. Rather than having a simple fill flash slider, as was the case in LR 3, LR4 allows you to adjust highlights, shadows, whites, and blacks all independently. As a big fan of the highlight recovery feature in LR3, I'm pleased to see these additional features in LR4. However, the added control does also mean that adjusting the light in the photo takes a bit more tweaking than in the previous version of the program. I also found that adjusting the luminance--both the overall luminance and color-specific luminance as necessary--really helped to even skin tone.

At any rate, below are a few of my favorite photos from the shoot. As always, I'm grateful for constructive feedback!

Delightfully Desaturated

In an effort to get the most out of my remaining days of my free trial with Adobe's Lightroom, I've started randomly experimenting with settings just to see what kinds of whacky things I can create.  Of course, most of what I accomplish involves making some previously fine photos really, really ugly.  Every once in awhile, though, I stumble across something that really works.  I present Exhibit A:


Original:

Experiment:

And now to share my secret: desaturation.  Ok, I may have given that one away a little with the title of this post.  There are other, much more complicated ways to accomplish this look once you've mastered the art of using selection tools, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover this handy little short cut.  So, the key is to pick a photo where the colors in the subject share no common elements with the items in the background--otherwise, you end up with a fully saturated subject, and a few random streaks of color in the background.  In the "Develop Room", scroll down the toolbar on the right until you hit the "HSL/Color/ B&W" section.  You can click on individual colors (displayed in boxes below the heading, above the sliding bars), then desaturate individual colors one-by-one by sliding the saturation bar all the way to the left.  Just don't desaturate the colors featured in your subject.  Voila!  Quick and painless, huh? 

I liked this particular technique so much that I went a little crazy with it.  As I said, it doesn't really work if the colors in your subject appear in the background, too--but it was fun playing with the saturation on a variety of photos and seeing some of the surprising successes.  I've shared two of my favorites below. 

Original:

Experiment:

Original:

Experiment:

Therapee for Photographers

As you know if you've been following my blog, I'm a girl on a budget, which means that my general philosophy when it comes to photo editing software is cheaper=better, free=best.  Of course, it's not a hard and fast rule; obviously a free program that doesn't do what you need it to do is pretty much worthless.  That being said, there are lovely, smart people out on the interwebs who have designed freeware that, admittedly, isn't quite as flashy and straightforward as the Adobe equivalent software, but still does an excellent job of performing the same functions as the very expensive Adobe software.  GIMP is the obvious example, here--the freeware answer to Adobe Photoshop.  Turns out, though, that there's also a freeware equivalent of Lightroom (you may recall I've been using Lightroom on a free 30 day trial, and my last post outlines some of the basic functions of the program if you're interested).  The program is called Raw Therapee, and it's available for download here if you'd like to try it out for yourself.

My initial impression of the program is, overall, positive.  The developers of Raw Therapee have clearly gone out of their way to make the program similar to Lightroom in layout and appearance, and a lot of the controls work in a pretty intuitive way: much like Lightroom, there are sliding bars for most of the functions, and you can enter a numerical value or simply click and drag to make adjustments to your photos.  The program also appears to have all of my favorite Lightroom functions--highlight recovery, luminance recovery, the ability to alter the black point separate from adjusting contrast, etc.  On the downside, the program seems to be struggling to open some of my photos--not many, but a few appear to be compacted, with the gap between the compacted photo and the original size of the photo filled by vertical lines.  Disproportionately this is happening with photos that have been scanned, but it has happened with a few I shot digitally as well, and, in some cases, it can display the original scanned photo fine, but struggles with versions I have edited in GIMP.  I've provided an example so you can see what I'm talking about below.  I'm not sure why this is happening, but it is a definite strike against Raw Therapee; I haven't had any problems like this with Lightroom. 

As you can see, though, the interface is fairly similar to the interface in Lightroom, so the program is fairly user friendly.  I haven't tested this out yet, but it is also supposed to tie in well with GIMP, and, like Lightroom, it allows you to develop images shot in RAW format (if you don't know what RAW format is, just ignore that; if you do, I'm guessing you already know what I mean by develop RAW images).  The other big drawback that I've found so far is that instead of exporting your edited image to the folder of your choosing without ever altering the original, Raw Therapee requires that you save the file using a "save as" function, which increases the likelihood that you could inadvertently save over your original image.  Another thing to note (this isn't necessarily a con for me, but could be for some people) is that there aren't a lot of preset edits in Raw Therapee (i.e. there is a massive list of adjustments--black and white 1, black and white 2, old fashioned, etc. that you can make in Lightroom), so if you rely on preset edits, you may need to do some digging online to find plugins for presets in Raw Therapee.  On the whole, though, it has a wide range of handy tools--as far as I can tell, you can do everything in Raw Therapee that you can do in Lightroom, and some that Lightroom doesn't have as well (and as soon as I can figure out what these tools do, I'll be more specific about that...).  I haven't found it as easy to figure out as Lightroom, but I'm sure with some concentrated time with the manual, things will become more apparent.  That said, I decided to run a quick test to see if the programs can produce the same results: I edited the image below twice--once in Lightroom, and once in Raw Therapee.  I leave you to judge for yourself (keep in mind I've spent about 15 more days with Lightroom than with Raw Therapee, so at least some of the differences you see are, I'm sure, due to my lack of expertise in Raw Therapee).

Lightroom:

Raw Therapee:

Dusting

Since about 2003 (I think), I've been shooting almost exclusively digital.  As much as I love the process of developing and printing with film photography, I simply don't have the resources for film photography these days.  Even beyond the cost of film, I don't have access to a darkroom, and who wants to take their precious photographs to the 1 Hour Photo booth?  Half the fun of shooting film is developing the film and enlarging!  So, my images generally go straight from camera to laptop these days. 

I did, however, pull a crazy all-night scanning session sometime during my transition from film to digital in order to digitize my favorite prints.  Well, my favorite prints of the ones I happened to be able to locate when I was struck with the scanning insanity (or, if you prefer, scansanity).  Anyway, it turns out that when you're sleep deprived and on a mission, you don't take really important steps like, say, cleaning the scanner.  So, as you can see below, I ended up with a big line down some of my photos, in addition to a lot of dust.  Bleh. 

So, time for some editing, I guess.  Now, the dust is a pain.  I did the editing on this between Lightroom and GIMP.  The dust was time-consuming, but easy enough.  Lightroom has a healing tool which allows you to adjust your selection tool size and select the area you want to "heal".  Lightroom then picks nearby pixels to clone over the spot in need of healing.  It's not always perfect--sometimes it does a really bad job of picking the best pixels to copy.  However, you can easily adjust the area it selects to copy from by dragging the selection circle to another area of your choosing.  The giant, ugly line, however, was not so easy.  Now, maybe there is a very simple way to get rid of a nasty streak in your photo that I'm just not aware of, but that pesky line took well over an hour zoomed in about 1500% with the clone tool...and a lot of CTRL + Z action (for those of you who don't know what that is, it's the shortcut to undo--very handy when you clone something, hate what you've done, and want to delete it...repeatedly).  As you can see below, I managed to get rid of the line and the dust--it's not perfect, but I'm pretty pleased (yes, I also cropped a bit while I was cleaning the photo up anyway).  Lesson learned, though!  Save yourself hours by cleaning the scanner first!

Let There Be Light...for 30 Days

I know I've been going on non-stop about GIMP, due largely to the fact that it is 1) powerful and 2) free.  However, I've been persuaded to try Lightroom by Adobe on a free 30 day trial, and, I have to confess, I'm impressed.  Obviously there are a lot of things that can be done in GIMP--in fact, it may be that GIMP can do everything Lightroom can.  If so, I just haven't found a way of doing some specific things in GIMP yet.  That being said, I'm really enjoying Lightroom.  Granted, I haven't completed any tutorials, and I've only been playing around with the program for about two days.  Even so, here's my run-down, followed by some before and after examples so you can see what I'm talking about:

Pros:
1) The program is pretty intuitive and user-friendly.  As I said, I haven't done any tutorials yet, and I've been happily editing for two days.

2) The recovery feature is AWESOME if you have photos with high dynamic range.  In other words, there's a tool that allows you to tone down some of the highlights in your photo--so if your insanely blonde friend looks like her head is glowing while everyone else looks normal, you can recover some of the color and contrast in her hair so that she looks a bit less like an alien.

3) You can independently tune your blacks, so you're not stuck fiddling with contrast and washing out your highlights when all you really want is to make your blacks a bit blacker.

4) The heal tool certainly isn't perfect--GIMP is a better choice for cloning.  However, it's easy and quick, and does a great job on small spots and imperfections.  For touch-up jobs, you can spend seconds instead of hours correcting minor blemishes in your photos.

5) The luminescence tool allows you to ditch some of the graininess in photos shot in low lighting.  Crank it up too much and people begin to look like they've had too much plastic surgery.  On a low setting, though, you can make your photos look a little softer/smoother without losing clarity. 

6) There are lots of fun creative modes to play with to give your photo a unique look.

7) Lightroom won't overwrite your photos, so you don't have to worry about accidentally losing your originals.

8) Dodging and burning is a little different from the way it's handled in other programs, but it's quick and easy to learn, and you can do more than adjust exposure--you have options for brightness, clarity, sharpness, saturation, and contrast.  Nice, huh?


Cons:
1) Adobe programs aren't cheap.  In fact, I was ready to do a happy dance when I found Lightroom for $150 because on the Adobe site it's $300.  However, you can do a 30 day trial for free on the Adobe site (which I'm doing before I part with $150).

2) I'm not impressed with the Autotone function.  Lightroom is great for easily adjusting things by hand, but Autotone seems to like things to be really washed out and grainy.  I imported a few photos with Autotone on by mistake and I struggled to get them looking normal; I couldn't believe I had taken such bad portraits at a paid gig.  It was only when I reset the photo that I realized what had happened.  Among other adjustments, the Autotone feature cranked the brightness and fill light way too high, and turned the contrast way down, and the photos looked overexposed and unfortunate.

3) Perhaps I'm just not looking in the right place, but it seems that all zooming is limited to preset values, so I spend a lot of time and effort fidgeting with 1:2 vs. 1:4 vs. 2:1 vs...you get the idea.  Zooming into a specific area by a specific percentage seems to be an impossibility.  If you know something I don't on this front, I'd love to hear that I'm wrong because the zooming is rather frustrating.

4) The program can watermark on export--this is a pro, except that it doesn't look like you can adjust the position or opacity of your watermark.  Again, I'm new to the program, so maybe I'm missing something, but having the watermark in the lower left corner of the photo means that it will be pretty easy to crop out.  Defeats the point of a watermark...



Alright, enough talk.  Time to show you what I'm talking about.  Below are a few before and afters.  The first set of photos was from a film shoot, and when I scanned the photo,  it was covered in dust, it looked grainy, and it just generally wasn't a very good representation of the original photo.  Enter Lightroom.  Obviously, it's still not perfect--there was some dust I will have to remove in GIMP, and I'd like to clean up the background a bit.  However, for the speed and ease of editing, I was pretty pleased with the difference Lightroom made.  Note: luminescence was particularly helpful for reducing the grain, and the heal tool was used to get rid of some of the dust and the big scratch on her arm from the original photograph. 

Before:

After:

Before:

After: