Valle Crucis Monastery, near Llangollen in Wales. This is a typical architecture type of shot for me, making use of doorways and windows as elements and shapes composed in the frame. The sun was fairly well to the side on this shot, which helped to enhance the texture of the stonework. If I was going to do any more to this I might square it up a little in Photoshop using Image/Rotate/Arbitrary and perhaps rotate it clockwise one or two degrees. I might also go into Image/Adjust/Variations and make the image a bit warmer by adding red and yellow. This is one of the few shots i took in colour and it was the warmth of the colour of the stone that struck me.
Showing posts with label Architecture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Architecture. Show all posts
Valle Crucis Monastery 2
Valle Crucis Monastery, near Llangollen in North Wales. This is the Latin name for 'Vale of the Cross' and the Monastery, founded in 1200/1201 by Madoc ap Gruffydd for the Cistercian order, is considered to be the best preserved of the North Wales monasteries. It is situated near the base of the Horseshoe Pass. This shot was taken in black and white mode using a combination of red and polarising filters. I liked the way the sunlight caught the building against the dark hills in the background. If I were to do anything more to this shot, it would be to remove the car on the extreme left using pixel cloning.
Valle Crucis Abbey 4 - Light and shade
Valle Crucis Monastery. I quite like this composition. The bases of the pillars and the wall on the extreme left, lead the eye to the doorway, and from there, the eye wanders to the windowed wall at the back of the ruin. The wall on the right also leads to this wall at the back of the ruin. I also like the balance of light and shade.
New York - Brooklyn Bridge
new york - brooklyn bridge, originally uploaded by foto-art.
Brooklyn Bridge. Spur-of-the-moment shot on Brooklyn Bridge. I loved the lamp post, so I placed it one third in from the right using the rule of thirds. This enable me to capture the backdrop of the skyscrapers. The white line on the bridge leads our eye into the picture and the pedestrians. It may be that this shot could be improved by turning it into a portrait shot by cropping the image just to the left of the two big skyscrapers in the far background just to the left of the lamp post, and deleting this left half of the picture - this would serve to focus attention on the walkway and pedestrians.
New York - skyline from Brooklyn Bridge
New York Skyline. A spur-of-the-moment iconic shot of new York from the Brooklyn Bridge. Converging verticals were corrected in Photoshop.
Valetta Harbour, Malta
Late afternoon shot of Valetta from the harbour. I love this shot. It was an opportunistic one taken while on a boat trip around the harbour, but for me, it has just come together. The light is fantastic, which when combined with these buildings, gives an almost renaissance painting feel to the image. It was taken about four o'clock in the afternoon in mid September, as the sun was lower in the sky. This means that the light is 'warmer', because more red light gets through whereas the the harsher, U.V. light, which can be picked up as giving a cold, blue cast to the picture, does not penetrate the atmosphere so much as it does at midday. Because the light is less harsh, shadows are softer. becasue the sun is lower in the sky, there is more texture and character highlighted on the buildings.
FISH WEATHER VANES - Converging verticals Photoshop tutorial
Fish weather vanes at Southport, Lancashire, England, U.K.
When taking photographs of architecture, converging verticals can be an issue, as you can see from the original small photo at the top of this post. Sometimes, you want to take a picture of a building, but you cannot get any further away from it than accross the street. This means that you have to use a wide andle lens to get the whole building in the frame, and you also have to point the camera upwards a little to get the top of the building in the frame. This creates the effect of converging verticals: where vertical lines appear to slope inwards. In olden days, professional photographers used special lenses which had a bellows extension in the the middle, so that the front elements of the lens could be angled independently of the rear elements. This expensive type of lens corrected this problem. The same correction can be made in Photoshop. Open your image in Photoshop, and draw a Marquee around the whole image using the Rectangular Marquee Tool. Click on Edit and in the drop down menu, click on copy. Click on File and on the drop down menu click on New. In the box that appears, make sure that White is selected for the background and click on OK. In this new file window, click on Edit and in the drop down menu click on Paste. Your image will appear in this new file windo as a photoshop file. Click on View and in the drop down menu, click on Zoom Out. Click on Edit and in the drop down menu click on Transform, and in the new drop down menu, click on Distort. Little boxes will appear on the corners of your image and in the centre of the sides of the image. Place the cursor on the top right hand box, click and hold while dragging the mouse to the right. This will begin to distort the image so that converging vertical lines begin to become properly vertical. Repeat the procedure on the top left hand box and drag to the left. Repeat these two procedures until you are happy with the result. If the image appears too squat or flattened, click on the box in the centre of the top edge, and drag upwards. When you are fully happy with the image, double click on the image and photoshop will perform the transform. Then click on File/Save As and the file a new name and in the format box, click on the arrow and change the image from Photoshop to JPEG. Then click on Save. The effect can be seen in the above two photos. In addition, Auto contrast was used and colour saturation was increased in the final photo.
While you are in the Transform menu, you can see what the other effects do to your image such as Skew and Perspective.
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