University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA)

(Olympus E-3, 7-14mm at 7mm (2x crop factor), ISO 100, exposure 1/125 sec @ f/11)

This image shows the back side of the new wing of the Museum of Art on the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The architecture of the new wing is quite stark, with lots of clean, flat surfaces. It's quite a contrast to the original museum (to which it is attached), since the original museum was done in the Beaux Arts style (see here). The clean lines of the new structure offer some interesting photographic opportunities.

I took this shot on a sunny day in late morning. The sun was to my left and created a very high contrast situation which was difficult to capture. I tried to expose the image so that the bright side of the building wouldn't lose detail, while at the same time keeping detail on the shadow side. I was surprised that I was able to capture the entire dynamic range without any clipping. I used my Zuiko 7-14mm lens at 7mm. I backed away from the building to a point where I could capture the entire side while at the same time keeping the camera as parallel to the face of the building as possible. This lens is reasonably distortion free, but as with any ultra-wide angle lens, if you tip the lens you will start to exaggerate the perspective. Keeping the sensor plane parallel with the building minimizes that distortion. My goal was to try to take a relatively distortion free image and then crop out parts of the image that I didn't want. This approach is similar to what would happen if I had a true tilt-shift lens, but I don't have one of those, unfortunately.

The image above shows the original, unprocessed image. When I took the shot, I wanted to make sure I had some blue sky. I was thinking that I would probably want to convert the image to black and white and having the blue sky meant that I could easily lighten or darken the sky by adjusting the blue slider in Photoshop's black & white conversion tool.

When I started working on the image, I initially planned on keeping most of the sidewalk at the bottom of the image. I liked how the concrete led up to the building. However, I didn't like the manhole cover and the vent. I briefly thought about cloning them out, but decided against it. Instead, I started playing with different crops. I initially went for more of a square crop to eliminate the two manhole covers (bottom and lower right), but I still had the vent. I then cropped a bit higher to eliminate the vent. I also brought the crop in from the side, trying to keep the big sculpture (upper right) in the frame. These two crops are shown below:

I kept playing with the crop as I continued to work on the image, finally arriving at the crop of the finished image. The remaining work on the final image involved converting to black & white and correcting for some of the remaining lens distortion. The series of images below show the steps I took in arriving at the final image. Some of the changes might be hard to see at this size.

The white balance adjustment was created by picking a black point and a white point using the curves eye dropper tools. When I was working with the color image, I thought it made the concrete too yellow, so I used a layer mask to limit the effect to the sky. Ultimately in the black & white conversion this layer probably didn't have much effect.

Since I decided to convert the image to black & white, I experimented with various photo filters. I finally settled on blue. The blue filter let me darken the sky more as well as some of the other shaded areas. It also darkened the bright side a bit, but that was fine.

For toning, I used the curves adjustments you see to the left. This curve adjusts the red and blue curves to give the tonality of the old platinum toning process. I didn't create this curve myself, but rather downloaded it from Paul Butzi's web site from an article discussing image toning. For this application, I applied the curves adjustment and then backed off on the opacity to about 58%.

At this point the image was mostly done. However I was not happy with the remaining distortion in the image. The left side was pretty good, but the right side wasn't straight. Since the building has nice vertical lines I wanted to get those lines to be as vertical as I could in the finished image. The first image shows the layer after I corrected for the distortion on the right side. Unfortunately this kicked the left side out a bit. I then applied a second correction to bring the left side back into vertical. I used Free Transformation with a combination of skew and warp tools to adjust the perspective.

I created a couple variations of this image, one being a lighter version of the finished image, but in the end I preferred the darker image.

All processing done with Adobe Photoshop CS4.

This image is for sale in my University of Michigan gallery on ImageKind.

Comments and feedback welcome.

Image and text Copyright © 2009 James W. Howe - All rights reserved.

Red Ferrari

(Olympus E-3, 14-54mm at 35mm (2x crop factor), ISO 100, exposure 1/100 sec @ f/8.0)

This shot of a new Ferrari automobile (sorry, I don't know the model for this one) was taken at the 2008 Concours d'Elegance held at Meadowbrook Hall in Rochester Hills, Michigan. This car was in a special section of the show reserved for new, high performance vehicles. This particular part of the exhibit included a couple different Ferraris, two different Saleen models as well as some other high end cars. When I originally went through the shots I took at the show, I passed this one by. It just didn't grab me. However, I was passing through my images at a later date and I decided to see if there were things which would improve the image.

(as shot)

The image above shows the image as it came from the camera, before any processing at all. I liked the composition, but the color of the car was a bit off, the lighting was too bright (It was taken on a bright, sunny day) and there were other aspects of the shot which weren't great.

I had imported the image into Lightroom 2.0 and most of the processing of this image occurred there. To the left, you can see the history panel from Lightroom which shows the adjustments that were made.

I started with some exposure correction to make the image less bright and then pumped up the blacks to give it a little more contrast. I then adjusted the color a bit to make the red a little stronger. It may not be exactly what the car looked like, but my feeling of the car was that it was red so that was what I wanted to see in the image.

The next section involved adding some post-crop vignetting. For me the vignetting was change which made the biggest improvement. The addition of the vignette made the car look like it was under a spotlight. It also highlighted two distinctive elements of a Ferrari, the badge and the stallion.

The image to the right shows the state of the image after making the Lightroom adjustments. It was definitely better, but there were a couple aspects of the image that I still didn't like.

First, I didn't like the red color which was reflected in the stallion. The other was the fact that the background color of the badge was so faded. I think the angle of the sun just really washed out the yellow which should have been there.

I opened the image in Photoshop to make some local adjustments. It's possible that I could have done the same thing with the adjustment brush in Lightroom, but I'm not adept enough at that tool as of yet.

Here is a the Layers palette from Photoshop CS3 for the final image. The major items are an adjustment layer to remove the redo from the stallion, another layer to correct the badge, a sharpening layer and a couple additional clean-up layers.

The images above show a closeup of the stallion before I made my change and after. The change was pretty simple. I used a saturation adjustment layer and selected the reds. I then set the saturation to 0 to eliminate the red. Of course, the car was red so that pretty much took the color out of the car. I fixed that by creating a layer mask which masked out all of the car but left the grille alone.

The next thing to change was the Ferrari badge. The background should be yellow and in the raw image the color just wasn't right. I took another image which had a Ferrari badge in it and i sampled the yellow color. I then simply created a new layer on which to paint. I used a brush with the color set to Ferrari yellow and painted over the badge. I painted relatively carefully but I wanted to make sure the yellow was everywhere I needed it to be. I then cleaned things up by zooming in and painting on a mask to remove the yellow from places where it shouldn't have been.

(layer mask)

After I sharpened the image, I noticed that there were several flecks on the paint which were probably left after the car was washed. I created a layer and used the spot healing brush to remove them. Tedious, but simple. The other thing I did was to remove some reflections in the hood which looked more like paint flaws. I created another layer just for this and again used the spot healing brush to remove the unsightly reflections. The images below show a closeup of the hood before and after the spot healing operation

I'm happy with the way the image came out. I think the badge color now looks realistic and the vignetting makes the car look like it was lit from some lighting source rather than looking like a car that is just sitting out in the sun.

This image is for sale in my automobile details gallery.

Comments and feedback welcome.

Images and text Copyright © 2008 James W. Howe - All rights reserved