Shadow Lander
#SlidersSunday
A photo that I'd always wanted to upload, but I somehow was never happy with the necesseray sliding - until now. Why "necessary" sliding?, you might ask. Well, this was a mere snapshot, one of those "hit the shutter button quickly or that moment is gone" shots that we all know about. Taken already in late spring 2018, when Sabine.R and I were waiting for the blue hour at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of the Cultures of the World - HKW -, the former Berlin Congress Hall). The HKW lies amidst the huge Tiergarten park area, and some of the tall trees there apparently were the local crow population's nighttime gathering place. While the area was almost totally devoid of humans, there was quite a bustle and hustle, a constant coming and going of crows - at a considerable noise level, so probably their day had been an eventful one, and now they were swapping stories ;-) The HKW isn't an easy buidling to photograph (please check my album for more images, if you like), and at one point I was as interested in the crows (which also met on top of the HKW's roof) as in the building itself. When I spotted this crow - and its landing shadow - I was just about to take my camera down to walk around the building to find a different, more interesting angle to shoot from. So I quickly switched my cam (my faithful little "always in my bag" LX100) back on and hurried to get my, hopefully sharp enough, shot. And sort of sharp enough it was, but only sort of. Especially the roof had just a little too much (motion) blur to make it pleasant to look at.
And here the necessary sliding comes in. Apart from cropping the image to that "pop-artish" square format and increasing the colours' saturation and such for that extra "pop", I felt that I had to do something about the "ever so slightly too unsharp" parts of the roof. In the end I decided to borrow the concrete texture from one of the many other sharp images I'd taken there. It was a little tricky to blend the texture in at the correct angle, because even if one thinks so, one never takes two images at the exact same angle, but in the end I think I got it right. Sort of ;-) There also was some considerable noise reduction / detail extraction going on (not in one processing session, but literally over the past months, because I would return to this image every now and then) which, for most of the part, were painstakingly done by masking things out in PS. So it was some sort of revelation and also a slight annoyance when I applied my finishing touches only yesterday - in my newly bought programme Topaz Sharpen AI - which did all of the aforementioned: decrease the motion blur and noise, and sharpen the image still some more...in one single step ;-)
Happy (Sliders) Sunday, Everyone, stay safe, stay well, stay happy!
Shadow Lander
#SlidersSunday
A photo that I'd always wanted to upload, but I somehow was never happy with the necesseray sliding - until now. Why "necessary" sliding?, you might ask. Well, this was a mere snapshot, one of those "hit the shutter button quickly or that moment is gone" shots that we all know about. Taken already in late spring 2018, when Sabine.R and I were waiting for the blue hour at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of the Cultures of the World - HKW -, the former Berlin Congress Hall). The HKW lies amidst the huge Tiergarten park area, and some of the tall trees there apparently were the local crow population's nighttime gathering place. While the area was almost totally devoid of humans, there was quite a bustle and hustle, a constant coming and going of crows - at a considerable noise level, so probably their day had been an eventful one, and now they were swapping stories ;-) The HKW isn't an easy buidling to photograph (please check my album for more images, if you like), and at one point I was as interested in the crows (which also met on top of the HKW's roof) as in the building itself. When I spotted this crow - and its landing shadow - I was just about to take my camera down to walk around the building to find a different, more interesting angle to shoot from. So I quickly switched my cam (my faithful little "always in my bag" LX100) back on and hurried to get my, hopefully sharp enough, shot. And sort of sharp enough it was, but only sort of. Especially the roof had just a little too much (motion) blur to make it pleasant to look at.
And here the necessary sliding comes in. Apart from cropping the image to that "pop-artish" square format and increasing the colours' saturation and such for that extra "pop", I felt that I had to do something about the "ever so slightly too unsharp" parts of the roof. In the end I decided to borrow the concrete texture from one of the many other sharp images I'd taken there. It was a little tricky to blend the texture in at the correct angle, because even if one thinks so, one never takes two images at the exact same angle, but in the end I think I got it right. Sort of ;-) There also was some considerable noise reduction / detail extraction going on (not in one processing session, but literally over the past months, because I would return to this image every now and then) which, for most of the part, were painstakingly done by masking things out in PS. So it was some sort of revelation and also a slight annoyance when I applied my finishing touches only yesterday - in my newly bought programme Topaz Sharpen AI - which did all of the aforementioned: decrease the motion blur and noise, and sharpen the image still some more...in one single step ;-)
Happy (Sliders) Sunday, Everyone, stay safe, stay well, stay happy!