One day after work I went out to shoot some photos. I was thinking of shooting the Opera House in Copenhagen. But on my way I passed the Eastern High Court of Denmark and saw the shadows from the gate, and I shot those instead of the Opera House.
Shooting the photo
My idea was to use the shadows as lead in lines and I really liked the color of the sky along with colors of the building. Preferable I would have liked to have door a little further to the left in the image, but a car was there and I couldn’t really get it to work. I tried several different compositions until suddenly the gates opened and I gave up doing more shots. I tried a couple of shots with the open gates, but it didn’t work.
The photo I took close to the ground on a small Manfrotto table tripod with an extension. With the extension fully extended it gets a little unsteady, but it is usable. I always have that one with me, if I don’t have one my full size tripods with me. Careful when you use such a small tripod in such a busy area, people are prone to kick your camera like a football, because they don’t see it.
The idea of going close to the ground, is to make the lines appear stronger, and the have less dead space from the road.
About the processing
This is the original shot, here you can see the tip of the car and a bit more of the road. That is too much of the street, but I could go into the street, because it was quite busy. The street it also way too yellow, and there is a nasty lens flare.
This is my primary post-processing to the photo done in Adobe Lightroom 4. I use Lightroom a lot and find that I can do so many things with it. Most of the post-processing I did to the photo is done in Lightroom, only the perspective crop and the the clean up in the photo is done in Photoshop. It looks like, that Lightroom 5 will allow me to get that done within Lightroom too.
I originally intended the photo to be an HDR, but it appeared not to contain a whole lot of Dynamic light, so I only did a standard post-processing to the photo, using the 0 EV version of the photo.
Lets run through the settings.
Exposure: I lowered it ever so slightly with -0.36 EV step to get the image just a little darker and more moody.
Contrast: This I raised to make shadows on the street appear more prominent.
Highlights: The slider affects the bright areas in the photo and either makes them lighter or darker. This I lowered to amp down the strong light from the lamp.
Shadows: Works like highlights, only it works on the shadows. I also lowered this to get the shadows on the street to become stronger. It is not that often I lower the shadows, but in this case I did it intentionally.
Clarity: This I raised to get more grittiness in the street and more texture in the building. It is a very potent slider and you should handle it with care.
Tone curve section: Here I adjusted two parts of the highlight area, I raised the Highlights a little again and but lowered the lights. How does these work compared to Highlights in the section above? The tone curve allows you to do more detailed adjustments, and they are applied on top of the settings. I often end up using both the slides both in the top section and in the Tone Curve section. Tone curve can add a more controlled contrast to the image. I use the slides, even though I could drag the curve around. I find that I can work the sliders in a more controlled way, than moving around the curve with my mouse..
HSL section: This section I really use a lot too tweak colors in the photo. In this case I removed all yellow saturation and lowered the orange. There is yellow in orange, but Lightroom is clever enough only to remove the yellow. So I got rid of my yellow street, but kept my orange building. In a later final touch step I removed all saturation in the street, to get it completely grey.
In Photoshop CS6 I did:
#1 Remove nasty flare. I did that with a combination of content aware fill and clone stamping until it looked nice.
#2 I then did my usual clean up. Some might argue, that the stuff really was there, and therefore it should also be there in the photo. I find that the images a better and stronger image by taking my time to remove the rubble and signs on the wall and gates. I’m not making a portrait of reality, but I am making a photo.
#3 I cropped the photo in a way to avoid the large square in the lower right hand corner, but keeping the sewer cover in the left corner. And then I straighten the image a bit, using perspective crop. I did that to get rid of the building on the left, with loosing my sewer cover.