Hong Kong Diptychs In Lightroom

I've been looking at maybe buying VSCO 6 and noticed that they have a 40% discount on all film packs at the moment. As I'm not sure how much I would use said film pack (as I tend to bake my own). So I started mucking around in Lightroom and made a new preset. It's a desaturated look, but with the reds and blues pushed back up. Add a bit of Contrast and Clarity, through in a vignette and bingo. I did add a bit of yellow to the shot with the trams, just to bring up the yellow grid on the road.

I'm pretty happy with the look of this preset, but working on these has made me miss Hong Kong. Maybe next year!

Asia 2013 part 6 :: The Philippines & The Wrath

Arriving in the Philippines from Hong Kong hits you like a slap in the face. "Life is hard and then you die", I don't know who said it, but they probably said it in the Philippines. It's hard for me to take photos here. Outside of the compound I'm staying, I'm pretty much the only white guy. Everybody sees me and everybody stares. Even in Hong Kong when I walked to areas that were Chinese only, I still felt my invisibility cloak was working. But here is a different story.

We visited my mother-inlaw's grave yesterday and the sky opened up. Thunder, lightning and torrential  rain, the full deal. Fe told the kids that Lola (Grandmother) was angry, because we had visited the swimming pool before visiting her grave. Superstition is a big thing for Filipinos. The guy (above) asked if he could hitch a lift on the back of the van (converted to a small minibus) that we were traveling in. He was a character.

There's so much beauty here, but such terrible conditions for the majority of the population.  We live such a privileged life in the west (all though I think that's changing), even struggling photographers should think themselves lucky. If we can afford to buy a camera and a couple of lenses, then we're doing ok in my book.

Janel sulks in the corner of our hotel in Cebu (above) . This doesn't happen too often thankfully. I look at my kids on this trip and hope that these will become amazing memories when they get older. I tell them how lucky they are to be able to travel to places that their classmates at school will probably never see. I hope that some day when I'm no longer here, they will sit around a table with their own kids, looking at grandpa's photos and telling them what a great childhood they had. I hope so! They're sitting a few feet away from me right now, watching Filipino TV with Fe. I've got tears in my eyes and I'm grateful for what I've got' The keyboard is getting blurred, so I'll just stop typing here and leave the rest of this post to photos. and captions. It's a short life...LIVE IT NOW!

Fe let's the kids stroke a small  stray bird in the airport.

Blind musicians play at Cebu airport.

It turned out that the plane we flew in from Cebu was the same one that went off the runway a few weeks before.

My nephew Ken, a really nice dude.

Full circle. The wrath of Lola.

The Digital Contact Sheet :: Episode 5

I know I'm a week late with this, but I've had a lot going on recently and I wanted to give the previous post a bit of time at the top. I've selected a sequence of 25 shots that mostly aren't that amazing, but it shows that not every frame needs to be a great shot. But as I've said before, it can be more important to tell the story, and that can often mean choosing a lesser photo that's part of the overall story. Remember that some of these shots will reveal larger versions when clicked on. The digital contact sheet above, shows the photos straight out of camera (OOC). I have all my X Series cameras set to +1 Sharpness and the files are actually usable OOC. Add a bit of Contrast and a small amount of Clarity in Lightroom and the files really pop. Check out my buddy Patrick La Roque,'s test photos from the X100s HERE for some amazing examples of OOC files from Fuji's latest X-Trans sensor. Make sure you read his X100s review HERE

This is my favorite frame, but straight OOC it's as flat as a witches tit and a bit overexposed. The composition is a little bit too centred for my liking, but it'll be too tight if I crop it at the same aspect ratio. I don't want it looking like a 10x8, so I'll have to live with it. I love that I shot this so close with the 35mm f1.4 and the guy had no idea I was even there!

This is the edited colour version and to get to this point I did the following. I added my home grown Lightroom Preset '1:02. 20 Contrast & 15 Clarity' which does what it says on the tin. If you shoot with an X-Trans sensor Fuji and use LR4, it's a good idea to have a couple of presets that add about +20 contrast and a few variables of Clarity (+5, +10, +15 works well). I tend to apply these after import, but not on import, or you're stuck with them. I then added a Graduated Filter from the left with -1.82 Exposure to darken the uniform. I added a -30 Vignette (preset) and then boosted the Contrast up to +36 to make it pop a little more.

It still wasn't reaching it's full potential, the main reason being that the colour wasn't doing anything to enhance it. So if the colour doesn't do it justice, it has to go. I made a virtual copy and applied my own Contrasty B&W preset and reduced the Highlight Slider a bit. The preset had re-set the Vignette slider to zero, but had darkened the shadows via the Tone Curve. I then applied a -20 Vignette to bring the edges that little bit darker. So this is the finished edit and was included in my essay 'A Mute Reminder' on The Kage Collective website.

And finally, here are the other four picks from the contact sheet. The two colour shots at the top only have contrast and clarity added. They were actually usable straight out of camera. The shot at the bottom right was converted using my Contrasty B&W preset in LR4 and the one on the left was converted to B&W using my own custom preset for street photography in Nik's Silver Efex Pro 2.

So that's it for Episode 5. I hope this has been interesting and shown that a photo straight out of camera might only be half way there. Remember that everything I've done to these photos is the equivalent to what would be done in a darkroom. There's no Photoshop trickery involved, just film-like editing.

If you found this post useful, you might like Shooting Street Photography With The Fujifilm X100. My settings and method for shooting street.