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Posts Tagged ‘Washington DC’

Personal, Photography, Technology, Travel | 0 comment

Friday the 13th

It’s a full moon tonight, and on Friday the 13th too! I know there are some crazy stats on how many times that congruence has happened, and how many years it will be until it will happen again. It will be a cloudy evening for us in the metro DC area. So, it will not be a good night for moon watching. I will have the camera at the ready in case there is a break in the clouds! Here are some photos from a less cloudy day in DC.

Washington, DC - Smithsonian Castle - ©TimeLine Media
Washington, DC – Smithsonian Castle – ©TimeLine Media

We walked back to the Smithsonian Castle to get more exterior photos in the gardens at this time. It is always nice to get a second chance at a shoot. This is something that is impossible in most situations. At sporting events, weddings, or corporate presentations, you only get one chance to capture the images that they are wanting. Practice with my gear is really needed in personal shoots like these photo walks. It gets me familiar with all the different settings, where all the buttons are located on the camera body, and how to dial them in. I remember something that I used on this walk to help with the events I covered over the weekend. Moreover I will probably use on my next shoot.

Smithsonian Castle, Washington, DC - ©TimeLine Media
Smithsonian Castle, Washington, DC – ©TimeLine Media

The red bricks of the castle really pop out nicely in high dynamic range photos. With the sun high in a partly cloudy sky, the background becomes a beautiful blue. After putting the bracketed images through the HDR processor, you can really boost the structure of the bricks, and the color of sky to make them contrast nicely. I was much happier with the image I was able to get from this walk through than the one a few weeks ago. It was much later in the evening, the sun was a little closer to the horizon giving more direction to the light.

Reflecting pool by Smithsonian Castle - ©TimeLine Media
Reflecting pool by Smithsonian Castle – ©TimeLine Media

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

Personal, Photography, Technology | 0 comment

OnOne Perfect Effects – Tech Thursday

Post Processing

Almost there with getting through my backlog of photo edits! Just in time for the weekend coming up. I am scheduled to cover the That’s Dancing Summer Showcase on Saturday. If you will be dancing, please see me at the studio! I will be taking orders there for special event pricing for your photos. For today’s post, I will be looking at the OnOne Software Perfect Effects 8 plugin for Adobe Lightroom.

Washington Monument - out of camera - ©TimeLine Media
Washington Monument – out of camera – ©TimeLine Media

Lightroom Plugin

If you follow OnOne on social media, or if you are on their mailing list, they have lots of tutors and offers for their products. A few months ago, they offered this program completely free! I have wanted to try their software for a while, but I know that I do not have the time to really invest in a new program. After downloading, it easily integrates into Lightroom. To start working on an image, right click the photo, select “Edit In” then select “Perfect Effects 8”. You will then have the option to work on the original image (if it is a Tiff or JPG file) or to work on a copy with Lightroom adjustments (if it is a RAW file).

OnOne Software Perfect Effects 8 - ©TimeLine Media
OnOne Software Perfect Effects 8 – ©TimeLine Media

The program will open and you have all the presets listed on the left. When you select one of the presets, the large preview in the middle of the screen will change with each selection. On the right panel, you can see that Perfect Effects uses layers, much like Photoshop, to have more control over the adjustments. For this preset, I like the saturation that it adds to the sky and the grass. Here is the photo after export-

Washington Monument - Magic Forest preset from Perfect Effects 8 - ©TimeLine Media
Washington Monument – Magic Forest preset from Perfect Effects 8 – ©TimeLine Media

The presets have a large amount of choices to change your images. You can add borders, grain, you can even make tilt shift images with their blur options. Many of these functions are already available from mobile photo editing apps, but now you can have this in the desktop. The control that you have over them can be fine-tuned with the layers in Perfect Effects 8. I will definitely try more of this with future projects to see the power of the program, but as a first try, it is really impressive!

Washington Monument with grain and borders from Perfect Effects 8 - ©TimeLine Media
Washington Monument with grain and borders from Perfect Effects 8 – ©TimeLine Media

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

Event, Personal, Photography, Travel | 0 comment

Smithsonian Buildings Tilt Shift

Washington, DC

The blog has been very ballroom dance heavy the last week. The dancing photos have just been a big part of my computer time, so I had them at the top of mind lately. I’ll start switching the subject out today. A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to walk around some Smithsonian museum buildings in Washington, DC.

Kryptos statue - Washington, DC - ©TimeLine Media
Kryptos statue – Washington, DC – ©TimeLine Media

During the summertime months, the area is filled with groups of tourists, school groups, and other visitors to the city. Mixed with all the government workers going about their business, it is a busy time for this area. I blended in much more with the tourists pointing their cameras at all the recognizable buildings.

Lens Practice

For this walk, I just had one lens on my camera – the 24mm PC-E tilt shift. I wanted to make more comparisons with some larger buildings than the ones in my neighborhood. The Hirshhorn Museum was one that I wanted to try. There are usually not as many pedestrians or large buses parked by the Jefferson Street side, so I went there for my test. Here are the two images, the first uncorrected with the camera pointing up towards the building, the second shifted to straighten the lines of the facade.

Hirshhorn Musem - Washington, DC - perspective uncorrected - ©TimeLine Media
Hirshhorn Musem – Washington, DC – perspective uncorrected – ©TimeLine Media
Hirshhorn Musem - Washington, DC - perspective corrected - ©TimeLine Media
Hirshhorn Musem – Washington, DC – perspective corrected – ©TimeLine Media

The second is really a different view than what you see as you drive by. The main circular section looks to be suspended in mid air one story above street level. As you take photos of the building when you walk by, the “leaning back” perspective is what you normally see from close below the structure. The corrected version seems so straight, that it does not look right to my eyes! When drawing straight lines, though, everything lines up as it would on a sheet of paper if you were making a blueprint of the building. This was my first try, and it will probably not be the last time that I go back to a familiar place that I am accustomed to seeing with distorted vision due to perspective.

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

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