There are so many memorials scattered throughout Washington D.C.’s streets. The most memorable are easily recognizable from their appearance on currency, movies, and TV shows. However, the smaller World War I Memorial is dedicated to the resident of the District of Columbia that fought and died in the Great War. It was recently restored by the National Park Service in 2011. Overall the work was done very well. The memorial glows out of a section of trees along Independence Avenue. It is a short walk from the larger World War II Memorial, and the Lincoln Memorial. Although it was not the final destination for the evening, it was a really pleasant surprise to see. Since it was a little off the path, it was easier to get clean photos without other people in the area.
At this time the improved lighting under the dome made for a nice setting apart from the nearby trees. When I edited these photos, I pushed the white balance sliders much closer to the blue side of the scale than normal. Without any people in the frame, it is much easier to play with this setting. Most people look better warmer in photographs – more to the yellow side of the slider. But here, the blue makes a nice contrast with the light under the dome, and it emphasizes the time of day.
It’s nice to play tourist in your local area sometimes. We’re just lucky to be close to such a photogenic place! I’ll have more from other stops on this photo walk. Have a nice weekend!
It has been a while since I did a personal photo assignment. The weather has been very cloudy and stormy. This is a great time for photos especially in the summer months. The best time to make landscape photos is either early in the morning around sunrise, and early in the evening around sunset. Summer months in US makes this very difficult unless you get up really early before the sun! Well, this was not my day for getting up early, so the light was already strong.
Occoquan River Shores
The setting is a pier that stretches out into the Occoquan Bay in northern Virginia. Since the time was not optimal time for the best photos, I used a Neutral Density (ND) filter to help me out. This filter is like putting sunglasses onto the front of your lens. It blocks all the light coming into the lens which darkens the exposure. Some people consider this one of the only filters you need in the age of digital photography. The effect that this filter creates cannot be done in Photoshop very well.
I am sure there are some digital wizards that can use blurs and effects to make moving water smooth while keeping static elements sharp. This is what I was going for in trying to get out to the river on a cloudy, rainy morning. I was hoping that it would be darker out, but I still had to go to extreme on the camera to get an exposure over one second long. The settings for this first photo are 10 seconds at f/32, ISO 50.
The water is starting to smooth out at 10 seconds, but I think I would need it to be at least 20 seconds before it becomes really silky smooth. Again, coming out earlier in the morning would make the overall frame darker, and I could have made the exposure time longer. The light is also very flat since the sun is high in the overcast sky making the overall light in the scene very even.
This would have been perfect for a portrait, but a little boring for the landscape alone. I varied the position of the camera for the second with similar results. I made the pier more of the base for the photo without seeing as much of the water. Unfortunately, the clouds were also not as compelling as they could be, so this also falls a bit flat for me. In a return trip, I hope to come in better light, and maybe I will get lucky with more dramatic clouds. I’ll post here if I get something inspiring!
Managing thousands of photos can be daunting task when returning from a shoot. The Library and Develop modules are where I live when using Adobe Lightroom. These have almost all the functions I need to manage and edit large sets of photos from events that I photograph.
Lightroom Module Selection Bar
Photography Software
I have talked about the Library and Develop modules in previous posts, but today, I want to focus on the Print Module. This is the next most used section for me. From here, you can prepare images for printing at the lab or at your home printer if you have one available. None of the photos from TimeLine Media are printed at home – all are sent to professional labs prior to sending in the mail. Why? The labs are experts at making prints. They print these optically onto photographic paper, not inkjet printing. There is still lots of development being done with professional inkjet printers, but I still prefer the optical prints on Kodak or Fuji paper.
Printing Options
The Print Module, much like the Develop module, also has presets available to use in your work. Lightroom comes with some built in presets that define what size print you like to make, and on what size paper on which you are printing. This is very helpful if you have a specific frame size in mind for your photo. You simply select the size photo, and you can instantly see if the photo fits well, if you could go larger, or if you need to change the perspective of your photo. All of these changes are easily made within either the Print or Develop modules:
Photo size selector
The next panel down allows you to change your page setup. Here you can change the background color of your page, or add a watermark. This helps to see if you final print will look better on a traditional white or black matte background, or if you would look better on a funky background that is uniquely fitted to your image:
Page setup
Ballroom Brag Book
Once you have all of your settings completed, you can save your favorite setup as a preset. This will allow you to apply this template for printing to any photo. You only need to select the photo from the Library Module, and drop it into the preset template in the Print Module. This is where you can add your creativity to your photography by creating new templates. I recently used this to make a ballroom dance book for the Arthur Murray studios in the area.
The book was 10″ x 10″, so I created a new template with these dimensions. My thought was to have a large collage with as many photos as I could fit on the cover to show how many great photos we have made over the passed year. Since the cover was square, I had the idea to make each image square. With this in mind I made a 1″x1″ square, then copied and stacked another 1″x1″ square on top of it. To complete a 10″x10″ cover, that made 100 photos! It took a long time to create the template, but I was really pleased with the results! It was a great way to get attention at the photo booth. If you want to use my template, I have attached it here-
