One Photo Focus: August

Having missed last months entry due to personal commitments, some of you who may have forgotten how these posts work, here is a quick reminder.

Each month, Stacy Fischer of Visual Venturing emails out an image which has been submitted by another photographer for other photographers to put their own spin on. You can edit it in any way you want and then they are placed in a gallery for all to see. You may remember that back in June my image was the one being emailed out and while I was anxious about what others would do to my image, I didn’t need to worry as the responses were fantastic. So back to this month were the image submitted was from Robin Kent of PhotographybyKent of The London Eye.

The initial image:

The London Eye, being the icon that it is, is something that I have photographed on many occasions. It is something is quite tricky to create a ‘new’ image of and the angle that Robin had chosen to shot from is probably one of the best, and most well-known positions. This led me to two questions: How much do I edit it? and How do I edit it? My decision was to edit it a little but do it a way that pushes my personal boundaries.

The editing process:

My first stages were much like any other image, applying the usual processes of auto and cropping (shown above) before getting into the finer detail. As I went through I started to become more picky with subtle differences being applied as well as chromatic aberration correction as I noticed fringing (where colours, are created at edges of subjects) on some areas which were off-putting. After correcting these I felt that it was missing something so I decided I would revisit a technique that I dabble in every so often – HDR.

Those of you who know about HDR will know that you need more than one image (ideally at least three) to layer together. Clearly with only one RAW image to work with I needed to think about how I could do this. In the past when I have tried to do this, it has only be done to a subtle amount, but to get the dramatic effect that I was after, I would need to create a range of different images. The three shown here, (two above and one below), show how extreme I needed to go to get the effect and after creating a total of five images, exported them into PhotoMatix Pro to get the final result.

Will I be doing this (style of editing) again?

As ever, this was great fun and an ideal opportunity for experimentation. What was most interesting to me this time was just how much can be done with just one image. It makes me wonder how many other images I could imitate HDR with. Maybe that’s for another time…..

Tags: ABFriday, architecture, buildings, colour, HDR, lightroom, london, London Eye, One Photo Focus, photo editing, photographic opportunities, photography, photography projects, PhotoMatix Pro, sightseeing, visual venturing

• August 5, 2016
• ABFriday
• 8 Comments