TimeLine Media Blog

Today is the last day to view and order photos from these 2013 events. They had previously expired, but were renewed prior to the holidays. Afterwards they will be removed from the website to make more room for 2014 events. If you have any questions, or need any help finding your photos, please let me know! The website for all the photos that are expiring, and the others that will still be viewable is:

http://proofs.timelinedc.com

DC Area Arthur Murray 2013 Summer Showcase

2013 DC Area Arthur Murray Spring Freestyles

That’s Dancing 2013 Summer Showcase

2013 American Star Ball

2013 Baltimore Dancesport Challenge 

Marsha Bonet Dance Showcase

2013 Salsa Bachata Throwdown

2013 River City Ballroom Dance Competition

2013 USA Dance Mid-Atlantic Championships

These event will be going back into the archive. It will be $40 to have the photos retrieved and re-uploaded to the website later. Thanks to everyone that has visited our website over the holidays to review their images. We are so happy that many of you have found images that you want to have hanging in your house, or posted all over your Facebook pages. We hope that you continue your dancing, and we catch you on the dance floor again this year!

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

Washington, DC

It is rare that I shoot ballroom dancing in black and white. For those that shoot RAW files with their cameras, it is possible to shoot in monochrome styles and preserve the color information in your images. What is displayed on the back of your camera is a JPG file. If you shoot to JPG files, there are many settings that the camera makes for you – sharpening, white balance, color saturation, that are more difficult to change once the settings are “baked in” to the JPG file. If you shoot RAW, all of these settings can be manipulated in the RAW processor/converter software afterwards. Adobe Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw which is built into recent versions of Adobe Photoshop, are examples of these.

Black and White Images

Most digital cameras allow users to shoot monochrome images directly in camera. If you shoot to JPG, the color data from your image will be tossed out by the camera. It will be impossible to recover this color information. Similarly to shooting on black and white negatives on a film camera this information is not recorded. However, if you shoot to desaturated RAW files, the only file that will be black and white is the JPG preview that will be show on the back of the camera. The RAW file will still retain all the color information taken at the time of capture.

That being the case, you can easily go back to the RAW file and convert it to black and white in Lightroom, and possibly do a better conversion than your camera! The images in posting today were all captured in RAW files. Although it does take up more room on your memory cards and hard drives to do so, there are just so many advantages to shooting in RAW, that I cannot see myself doing it any other way. This color to black and white conversion is just one of the many reasons to do so.

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

Frozen Reflecting Pool

We have traded the cold for rain! With this in mind, I have not been able to get out there to make more photos in the early morning. Overall, it has been too overcast and rainy to get me out there. I should have made the effort, however, I am backed up with other work . Additionally, I would need to gear up with rain repellent gear for me and the cameras. Needless to say, I got lazy this week. There is still a backlog of other images that I have not posted about on the blog. These are images of the Washington Monument at sunrise from the reflecting pool that is situated at the front of the Lincoln Memorial.

Washington Monument

This is one of the images taken straight out of the camera. In this case, I took a bracketed series of photos around this exposure to combine into an HDR final image. From this file, you can make edits right in Lightroom to bump up the Exposure, Shadows and contrast, then adjust the vibrance to make this image:

HDR image

I was surprise to see how much data you can pull from one Raw file! Processing the 9 different exposures into HDR Efex Pro 2, I adjusted the sliders in that program to get something similar. My goal was to bring out more detail in the monument face and trees lining the pool on either side since those areas were so dark.

When editing in HDR Efex Pro 2, I was able to use control points to directly edit the face of the monument. Sunrise is not the best time to photograph the Washington Monument from this angle. It loses a lot of the luster and shine with the backlight from the rising sun. I tried to pick HDR treatments where I could bring back the light color of the monument bricks. I already have some places in mind that are situated better in the early morning light to photograph next. If you have any suggestions, please let me know! Stay tuned-

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208