This is a shot I took during the week. I quite like this style of shot, so I thought I would share the preset I used.
The preset is called “PH Fashion Shoot II” and I found it at this site. I recommend downloading this set of presets (even if you don’t intend on using them) and just having a look at the settings they contain.
Enjoy!
I took this shot to enter in my workplace monthly photo comp in Decemeber. The theme for the month was “Broken”. Being Christmas time I got into the spirit and broke some tree decorations.
I was trying to capture a decoration in the process of breaking, but unfortunately my timing was never quite good enough. This was the best of the lot though, which I took just after it had broken.
There was a LOT of work in Lightroom 2.5 to complete this photo. The key to doing large area Adjustment Brush work like I did in this photo is to use a LARGE brush, and the Auto Mask feature. Don’t be too tempted to use a small brush to get in between things. If you keep the centre of the brush in the right spot, the Auto Masking will take care of the rest!
Shooting and PP Details as follows:
We just had a lunchtime summer storm roll through Brisbane, so while it was raining I took some shots of a tree near my house with the rain coming down on it. I thought it would be interesting to see the difference in the image of the rain with some different shutter speeds.
I setup my Pentax K200D on my tripod, mounted the Tair-11a 135mm f2.8 lens to get in close to some of the rain, and to keep the background blurred I set the aperture to f2.8. I set the camera to Aperture Priority mode (Av) to let it meter itself. The ISO was set to 400. This was the achieve a nice short shutter speed, and the resulting exposure was 1/640 sec and is shown below.
The following exposure I set the ISO to 100, and added a TianYa ND8 Cokin P sized filter in front of the lens (just held it by hand). This was to achieve a much longer exposure, and we end up with a 1/30 sec shutter speed and is shown below.
Take note of the difference in the rain drops. The first shot freezes the drops in mid air, while in the 2nd shot you get a long streak of falling water droplets. I personally prefer the first image, it conveys a sense of action to me that the 2nd image does not.
Processing on the first image was as follows :-
I was just reading this article, top 5 lightroom commands. I learnt something very handy so I’m sharing straight away. Lightroom 2 keyboard shortcut (Ctrl + “/”) will display the available keyboard shortcuts for the current module! Don’t forget to tell your friends, and don’t miss out on the other 4 helpful lightroom commands.
