"Pay attention to the world." -- Susan Sontag
 

Before and After: Flaming Feathers

I think it’s possible that flamingos may have lost some of their social standing over the years — in North America at least — as a result of their objectification as plastic lawn ornaments and even, occasionally, as Christmas decorations. Their presence at the entrance of many zoos — and their ubiquity as unnatural icons on many lawns (not mine!) — made me feel like they were sort of a zoo-cliche and that I might just discard their photos from my collection. But then I thought: ah, well, it’s not the birds’ fault, is it? — and decided to run a few pictures I had from Zoo Atlanta through my Lightroom and Nik Collection workflow to see how they came out. After a bit of trial and error to get the colors right, I ended out with a “look” to the photos that I liked: one that brought out the detail and thickness of their feathers, emphasized the contrasts between pink, orange, and red on their bodies, and rendered them almost as pretty as Fancy Beasts and Snakes on a Blog.

With one exception, Lightroom adjustments for these photos were pretty standard as I felt like I would want to do most of the color and contrast adjustments using the Nik Collection Color Efex filters. So other than basic exposure adjustments and sharpening, I decided to remove most of the shedded feathers scattered throughout the backgrounds or in the water as they were distracting to my eye, and I knew the filters would emphasize them and make them even more obvious. Lightroom spot removal to the rescue! Though I’d hate to calculate how much time I spent removing tiny clumps of feathers from each of these images, it was true that they acted like little light-catchers in the Color Efex filters — as I learned after missing some and having to continue the spot-removal effort even after I thought the photos were already done.

Among other things, the Nik Collection filters excel at enhancing colors, creating contrast improvements, and correcting color cast. In the Before and After gallery (scroll down a bit), the third picture in the second row shows a substantial color cast, where the yellow and brown from the background permeate the whole image, likely because of sunlight throwing a reflection across the scene. The fourth picture in that row shows how it looks after correction, where the yellow/brown is gone and the original colors of the bird and rocks have been restored. The filters I used to create a relatively consistent look across these photos were: White Neutralizer (which corrects some of the color cast and emphasizes whites); Brilliance/Warmth (which adds saturation to the colors and also helps separate background and foreground elements); and Pro Contrast (which completes the color cast correction and enhances contrast throughout the photo). For some of the photos, I also used Darken/Lighten Center to add brightness and create a focal point in the picture, to draw the viewer’s eye from the background to the main subject. The effects of this filter are most evident in the last four photos in the Before and After gallery below.

Here are the final versions of the twelve flamingo images; select the first one to see larger sizes.


If you would like to see how the images looked before and after the processing I described above, select the first image then page through the slideshow:

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Before and After: Fun with Big Rocks

At the base of Whiteface Mountain in northern New York, on the road to Whiteface Mountain Ski Resort, just before you cross a bridge over the Ausable River and where your eyes widen to take in the size of the mountain close up … there is a large dirt and gravel parking lot. If you park your car and walk up the mountain road, you just might miss the forest opposite the lot: it’s hidden behind rows of birch trees and ferns that have gathered in the sunlight and grown right up to the left edge of the road.

After you step beyond the birch tree gateway and through the knee-high valley of ferns, your feet land in a blanket of soft needles discarded by pine trees that have been growing and shedding for decades. Your sense of hearing is instantly altered: the pine needles absorb and mute sound from the road and river nearby just as if you’d walked through a doorway and closed the door behind you. Your footsteps make no sound. Bird-call that you didn’t hear just a few minutes earlier is suddenly everywhere, accompanied by the rhythm of a breeze fluttering back and forth over the landscape.

Inside this forest, many of the birch trees that likely grew in before the pines took over have become degenerating deadfall, scattered across the forest floor or leaning against the rocks, and the rocks … well, they’re just enormous. You’d need a ladder to climb onto most of them; their surface textures range from smooth but finely pitted to rough like sandpaper to something that feels like it was spit from a volcano — but was more likely created by snow and ice and the slow roll of glaciers that molded the Adirondack Mountains. The rocks with flattened tops have given life to their own miniature forests, where ferns, small shrubs, and even tiny trees have taken root.

Some of the pine trees have grown so close to the rocks that the rock surface and the tree trunk are barely separated: you couldn’t fit your hand in the space between the two. That’s the case with this blue-green monster that blocks your view of the river, poised as it is just a few feet from the cliffs that dive about thirty feet almost straight down. It’s striking that rocks this large are so far above the river, that they remained on higher ground while the river carved and deepened its path.

You wonder about the tension between the rock and the tree if the rock shifts and as the tree continues to grow, then you walk around them both to the clifftop and views of the boulders in the river below. The first few steps feel pretty comfortable; the second ones get your legs a little rubbery as the speed of the water flow seems to increase; then you’re just glad you brought a zoom lens.

After a few shots, you reel the zoom back in, step back into the quiet of the forest, make your way back to the parking lot, and regret that you have to leave, because:

Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life. — John Muir


If you got this far, thanks for reading and taking a look! These photos are among the landscape images I’m reworking; more about that project here: Flickr Reboot. If you would like to see before and after versions of the images that I processed for this post (including two bonus boulders not shown above), select the first photo below to begin a slideshow.

Before and After: Swamp Things

There are two galleries below: the first includes a set of images from a woodland swamp in northern New York, and the second contains the before and after versions of the same images, showing the differences between the original and final versions processed with Lightroom and the Nik Collection.

For the first two images, I tried to emphasize the detail of the beaver cuts on the tree trunks, while still conveying the aged, worn smoothness of those cuts. My approach to the third image was to highlight the pair of trunks topped with moss by adding green saturation and increasing focus and lighting on the trunks to separate them from the background.

With the wider angle images of the swamp, I started by treating them as low-key photographs by significantly darkening the backgrounds. As you can probably imagine from looking at the before images in the second gallery, the gray in the backgrounds — once darkened — would give the scene a heavily shaded, foreboding appearance. Not a bad look overall, and I may still do a set like that. But then I thought it might be interesting to try something else: convert the images from scary-swamp to happy-swamp by intensifying the colors and creating high contrast between the water (and the thick, green algae on the water’s surface) and the twisted deadfall throughout the scenes. The result, I think, suggests a greater sense of standing at the edge of the swamp, with the eye tracking from the greens in each foreground to the depths of the swamp and the trees in the backgrounds. The intensified saturation and contrast also brings out many more colors present in the images that weren’t evident in the original photographs.

I included the last four images from the same area just because I liked them. What photographer can resist a colorful clump of fungus (with a big bug in the middle!), some bright red leaves, and an old Ford truck partly buried in the woods?

Select the first image below to begin a slideshow, then skip to the second gallery if you would like to compare the before and after images.

Orchids Collection (Set 4 of 4)

The gallery below contains the fourth (and final!) set of orchid photos I’ve completed for my Flickr Reboot project  — using Lightroom and the Nik Collection by DxO to develop and enhance originals taken at the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

I’ve been documenting the project and my workflow using this category: Flickr Reboot.

The previous sets of orchid photos for this project are here:

Orchids Collection (Set 1 of 4)

Orchids Collection (Set 2 of 4)

Orchids Collection (Set 3 of 4)

So what’s next?

I figured out a slightly awkward way to extract file names from Flickr albums, put them in a document to create a text list, then copy and paste the list into Lightroom to filter my photo library. By doing that, I found all 1200 original images and have them organized in Lightroom Collections which I’m consolidating by subject, culling to remove images that I don’t want to rework, and adding some newer photos I took but never processed or posted anywhere. To keep the project interesting, I think I’ll take on subjects of a different kind: photos of Oakland Cemetery (because of the art and architecture of the site, the research I’ve done on its history, and the stories I can tell) or Zoo Atlanta (because … animals!), so I’m going to jazz up a couple dozen examples from these two subjects then decide which one to dive into. Stay Tuned!

Select the first image to begin a slideshow …. thanks!

Orchids Collection (Set 3 of 4)

The gallery below contains the third set of orchid photos I’ve completed for my Flickr Reboot project  — using Lightroom and the Nik Collection by DxO to develop and enhance originals taken at the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

I’ve been documenting the project and my workflow using this category: Flickr Reboot.

The first set of orchid photos for this project is here: Orchids Collection (Set 1 of 4). The second set is here: Orchids Collection (Set 2 of 4).

Many of the photos in this set (and the fourth and final set I’ll post tomorrow) were taken in lower lighting than those in the previous two sets. I was able to compensate for the darker conditions (and additional grain in the photos) by softening and darkening the background with contrast filters in the Nik Collection Color Efex Pro tool, then increasing center brightness to emphasize the flowers as focal points. As a last step, I used Sharpener Pro — selecting specific sections of each flower using control points available in all the Nik tools — to accentuate detail.

Select the first image to begin a slideshow …. thanks!