flavoredtape
✦ Now featuring: Seraphim by Otto Berkeley Bowing out this...
✰ This photo was featured on The Epic Global Showcase here: flavoredtape.com/post/154865494869
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✦ Now featuring: Seraphim by Otto Berkeley
Bowing out this Christmas with a scene I last visited a year ago, it was fun to revisit Regent Street to capture its festive lights. The image was shot early on a calm but very cold morning, when the usually frantic shopping street was empty except for occasional traffic. In comparison with my last take, my aim with this image was a darker and moodier tone, but also an image that placed greater emphasis on the light installation overhead, which this year echoes the street’s first Christmas decorations in 1954, at the time taking the form of traditional angels. This year’s installation by James Glancy Design stretches from one end of Regent Street to the other. Each of the 16 spirits has been beautifully sculpted and studded with shimmering gold and blue LED lights, which alternate and scroll to give the impression that the spirits’ wings are continuously extending and folding away. The challenge when shooting them is they’re lightweight, and, even on a morning with only a gentle breeze, the mesh making up the spirits’ garlands was constantly swaying in the wind. I overcame this by trading a higher ISO and wider aperture for a faster shutter speed, shooting again and again until I’d captured the empty street with a sharp take on the light installation. After this, I focused on photographing the traffic, predominantly taller double-decker buses, which I blurred into light trails with shutter speeds of two, three and four seconds. This gave me a variety of colours and styles of light trails to work with, and at the editing stage I was able to select the trails that conveyed the most vibrance and visual impact. The street itself was a combination of nine bracketed exposures, allowing me to cleanly blend detail in the street’s shadows with controlled highlights inside the shop windows using luminosity masks in Photoshop. I then used the Pen Tool to isolate the reservation between the roads, blending in brighter exposures with a radial gradient mask to emphasise how the light installation overhead was casting a glow on the ground beneath it. I used a combination of Colour Balance, Selective Colour and Hue/Saturation layers to accentuate the golden tones in the spirits’ lights, while toning down the warmer tones along the street itself and applying a gentle Gradient Map set to Soft Light to bring out the chilly tones in the shadows. After this, I blended in the light trails I’d captured from more than 50 buses, pushing towards orange and red tones to complement the blue of the spirits and the street, trying to find a balance on both sides of the road between height, length and intensity, and at the same time also trying to ensure that the rich detail of the architecture along the street wasn’t obscured. With this phase of editing complete, I used Silver Efex Pro to lower the midtone exposure and to lower the shadow structure along the roads and central reservation, where I wanted a smoother texture so as not to distract from the rest of the scene. I then used Colour Efex Pro’s Tonal Contrast filter to emphasise the highlight and midtone contrast in the light installation, as well as a very small amount of the Dark Contrasts filter, which reduced the glare within the shop windows and the brightness of the Christmas lights, and which also tightened up definition in the darker portions of the image. The final adjustments were mostly minor changes to the scale, hue and luminance of the light trails, where I tried to settle on a tone that I felt would complete the beautiful scene in front of me. There seemed to be a wonderful distinction this year between the serene spectre of the spirits above and the rush of energy from the traffic beneath, and although I wanted to emphasise the light trails created from the traffic, it was important to me to pare this down so that the viewer’s eye would always be drawn back to the light installation. The magic of the Christmas lights is what makes Regent Street a joy to visit and photograph every winter, but their tribute this year to the street’s original Christmas decorations added a certain poignance to the scene, and the spirits seemed to perfectly convey the grace and sentiment of the season while they watched over the bustling street below. You can also connect with me on Facebook, 500px, Google+ and Instagram.
✦ Now featuring: Seraphim by Otto Berkeley Bowing out this...
✰ This photo was featured on The Epic Global Showcase here: flavoredtape.com/post/154865494869
-------------
✦ Now featuring: Seraphim by Otto Berkeley
Bowing out this Christmas with a scene I last visited a year ago, it was fun to revisit Regent Street to capture its festive lights. The image was shot early on a calm but very cold morning, when the usually frantic shopping street was empty except for occasional traffic. In comparison with my last take, my aim with this image was a darker and moodier tone, but also an image that placed greater emphasis on the light installation overhead, which this year echoes the street’s first Christmas decorations in 1954, at the time taking the form of traditional angels. This year’s installation by James Glancy Design stretches from one end of Regent Street to the other. Each of the 16 spirits has been beautifully sculpted and studded with shimmering gold and blue LED lights, which alternate and scroll to give the impression that the spirits’ wings are continuously extending and folding away. The challenge when shooting them is they’re lightweight, and, even on a morning with only a gentle breeze, the mesh making up the spirits’ garlands was constantly swaying in the wind. I overcame this by trading a higher ISO and wider aperture for a faster shutter speed, shooting again and again until I’d captured the empty street with a sharp take on the light installation. After this, I focused on photographing the traffic, predominantly taller double-decker buses, which I blurred into light trails with shutter speeds of two, three and four seconds. This gave me a variety of colours and styles of light trails to work with, and at the editing stage I was able to select the trails that conveyed the most vibrance and visual impact. The street itself was a combination of nine bracketed exposures, allowing me to cleanly blend detail in the street’s shadows with controlled highlights inside the shop windows using luminosity masks in Photoshop. I then used the Pen Tool to isolate the reservation between the roads, blending in brighter exposures with a radial gradient mask to emphasise how the light installation overhead was casting a glow on the ground beneath it. I used a combination of Colour Balance, Selective Colour and Hue/Saturation layers to accentuate the golden tones in the spirits’ lights, while toning down the warmer tones along the street itself and applying a gentle Gradient Map set to Soft Light to bring out the chilly tones in the shadows. After this, I blended in the light trails I’d captured from more than 50 buses, pushing towards orange and red tones to complement the blue of the spirits and the street, trying to find a balance on both sides of the road between height, length and intensity, and at the same time also trying to ensure that the rich detail of the architecture along the street wasn’t obscured. With this phase of editing complete, I used Silver Efex Pro to lower the midtone exposure and to lower the shadow structure along the roads and central reservation, where I wanted a smoother texture so as not to distract from the rest of the scene. I then used Colour Efex Pro’s Tonal Contrast filter to emphasise the highlight and midtone contrast in the light installation, as well as a very small amount of the Dark Contrasts filter, which reduced the glare within the shop windows and the brightness of the Christmas lights, and which also tightened up definition in the darker portions of the image. The final adjustments were mostly minor changes to the scale, hue and luminance of the light trails, where I tried to settle on a tone that I felt would complete the beautiful scene in front of me. There seemed to be a wonderful distinction this year between the serene spectre of the spirits above and the rush of energy from the traffic beneath, and although I wanted to emphasise the light trails created from the traffic, it was important to me to pare this down so that the viewer’s eye would always be drawn back to the light installation. The magic of the Christmas lights is what makes Regent Street a joy to visit and photograph every winter, but their tribute this year to the street’s original Christmas decorations added a certain poignance to the scene, and the spirits seemed to perfectly convey the grace and sentiment of the season while they watched over the bustling street below. You can also connect with me on Facebook, 500px, Google+ and Instagram.