Saturday, August 30, 2008

NiN Concert - Year Zero Set


I've been out of action for a while because my monitor went kaput, leading to a couple of months of equipment upgrades. This is a cell phone shot from a recent Nine Inch Nails concert that I quite like. I probably have one of the worst cell phone cameras available, but it is occasionally quite handy. The gun-cross was an LED image, so I was a little surprised that it registered.

Sunday, August 3, 2008

Deer at Powder Valley

I saw this deer at Powder Valley earlier today (her young fawn was nearby, but I wasn't able to get a shot). This is the first picture I've processed with the new Lightroom 2.0 and my first impressions are good. I used two new features in this photo - post-crop vignette and picture profiles.

The post-crop vignette was really helpful for slightly darkening of the corners. I took the picture with a 50 mm lens and couldn't get close enought to fill the frame with the deer, so had to crop this shot. Before I would have had to launch Photoshop for the corner darkening, but now I can stay within Lightroom.

Picture profiles are the other new feature I used. Both Canon and Nikon have profiles that can be applied to RAW files, such as "landscape" or "portrait". It's still in Beta, but they can now be downloaded from Adobe labs and applied. This one is using Canon's "standard" profile, which ended up having the nicest impact.

The other processing I did in this shot was to de-saturate the greens using the HSL green slider - I think it helps the separate the deer from the background.

Camera data: Canon Digital Rebel, ISO 400, 50 mm lens, f/2.2, 1/125 sec.