Back to Mono

I was reading a black and white photo book and felt compelled to get out and shoot some monochrome images. I waited till to sun was low and went out on my quest for foreground interest. I didn't come away with a great deal, the sunset was great but I broke my own rules and came away about 10 minutes too early, I had to walk home backwards looking at the colours getting better and better! Anyway a polariser was used to really bring out the blue of the sky, I was at 90 degrees to the sun as this is where you get maximum effect of the polarising filter and I could get the light hitting the fence and grass. In photoshop used an unsharp mask to add a bit of contrast then some dodge and burning to selectively add contrast. Next I added a BW adjustment layer then flattened the image and converted to grey scale mode and then to duo tone mode, then I set to tri tone and used black and a 2 brown tones (can't remember the pantone codes). I converted back to RGB mode and saved. This split toning can be done in lightroom but I fancied doing it in CS3.

Fountains Abbey

This was taken at fountains abbey in North Yorkshire. There was a bit of a druid gathering going on (or people on a druid experience, whatever one of those is) you can just see them at the bottom of the frame but as the shutter speed was 13 seconds they are very blurred but it gave me an idea about processing this to try and get a mystic effect. It's basically another split toning image with the shadows set to blue and the highlights to green. I also added a slight diffuse glow in photoshop along with a little dodging and burning on the roof.
The exif data for this one was ISO 100, f/11 for 13 sec at 27mm, I am starting to look at ultra wide lenses now (10-22mm range) as this would have helped for the great interiors (and exteriors) at fountains abbey.

A split toning RAW conversion

I seem to be putting a lot of tree shots up at the moment, no real reason other than they are a subject I enjoy shooting so here's another. The sunset was great last night but my location selection wasn't the best but as it was getting a bit late I didn't want to move. You really don't want to be driving along looking for locations whilst the sun is setting, especially on windy country roads hunched over the wheel, marvelling at the sunset, very dangerous. I wasn't overly happy with the shots I got so I really experimented with my RAW conversion until I found an effect I quite liked. If you do shoot in RAW I would recommend getting adobe lightroom (here). It's just full of options for getting the most out of your photos and there are loads of tutorials on the web about the program, such as lightroomkillertips.com. Anyway the main effect I used here is called split toning, this is where you can pick the colour and saturation for the highlights and the shadows independently, I pretty much used yellow for both but you can use complimentary colours. It can be a bit hit and miss but that's the beauty of shooting digitally.
The info on this shot is as follows: f16 (to maximise DOF) for 1/2 second (so using a tripod) at about 34mm (shot in aperture priority). I did shoot with an exposure compensation of -2 this means the shot was underexposed (for the sky), I was originally going to merge 2 shots, one exposed for the sky and one exposed for the land but in the end I left the land as a silhouette because I liked the impact of the sky. Hopefully going to get some shots in the peak district tomorrow, where my foreground interest will be rocks instead of trees!