Darkening the Sky

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We had a trip to London over the bank holiday weekend, and I’ve been using some of the simpler methods available in PhotoShop [Elements] to make the images a little more punchy. Previously I’d been using layers to adjust the contrast in a specific area of the picture, but I found an online tutorial which uses a much simpler approach: select, feather and then use CMD [Mac] or CTRL [PC] and ‘L’ to bring up the levels editor. The results are quite dramatic. The first image is straight out of the camera:

1/125sec at f14, ISO 100 at 24mm

1/125sec at f14, ISO 100 at 24mm

The next is the same shot but with the levels adjustment:

1/125sec at f14, ISO 100 at 24mm

1/125sec at f14, ISO 100 at 24mm

I’ve actually used three of separate selections: before I worked on the sky I lightened the parliament building, with quite a low feather setting. Then I did two separate selections on the sky: the first was everything, which I darkened. At this stage it looked a lot better, but the lower half, where the clouds are quite packed, was still a little light, so I pushed this a bit more with a final selection.

I’ve taken a couple of bites to get this as it appears in the second shot. The first attempt was creating a halo around the building, where I was doing the lightening with too high a feathering. The top of the futhest tower of the parliament building is caught in the crossfire of the darkening, but I think the overall result is quite pleasing. There’s not really enough happening, especially in the foreground, to make it a terribly interesting shot, but the takeaway is that I’m going to add this to the list of techniques I’ll routinely apply to my outdoor shots.

Return to Hacking Tripods

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I wrote a post a couple of months ago about some problems that I was having with my tripod, specifically that the ballhead was drifting during long exposures. I parked the idea of trying to add a proper head to the existing legs after messing around unsuccessfully with various random bolts and attachments, and accepted the fact that I’d have to put up with it.

That was until a couple of weeks ago when we had a day trip to Ely. I was taking some pictures inside the cathedral with my 24-105mm lens and had to scrap every shot. It’s just to heavy for the integrated plastic ballhead, and the drifting problem returned in force. I also over-tightened the clamp out of pure frustration, and damaged the thread. I decided to take the plunge and ordered up a Manfrotto 486RC2 ballhead from Amazon. I’ve figured out a much simpler way of lashing it to the legs, as per the photo. One slight problem is that the only bolts that I’ve been able to find for sale are metric, whereas the head has an imperial-measure diameter. I’ve used some PTFE tape to bring the M8 bolt that I’ve used up a fraction, which is a pretty solid but non-permanent solution. In the meantime I’ve tracked down a contact back home [Ireland] who should be able to get me what I need.

Manfrotto head and National Geographic legs

Manfrotto head and National Geographic legs

Does One Sale….

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…make you a semi-pro? I’m going to suggest that the answer to that question – being a little tongue-in-cheek here 🙂 – is a resounding ‘yes’ as I hit another milestone last week with the sale of my first ever stock image. I earned pennies for it, but was still pretty pleased….