South Western House

A notable Southampton landmark.  Took some careful positioning to eliminate lamps, cars, bollards and the like – but this result has nothing  ’cut’ or ‘brushed’ out.  I was tempted to remove the yellow road markers but resisted.  Shot at a wide angle so a perspective crop used to straighten the verticals – Keystone Correction.  Evening light gives the shot some warmth.

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Twilight Crossing

A view of the Itchen toll bridge, Southampton from Peartree Common.  This spot on the East side of the river gives a great view of the bridge, especially in the twilight.  The cranes currently in Ocean Village give a little height to the subject.  The most difficult part of this shot was finding my way back over Peartree Common in the dark – still, I think it was worth it.

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Stitch on the Bridge

My first attempt at a stitch.  Two photos stuck together to create a panorama.  I wanted the whole bridge and the church building – two pictures was the only way to do it from my vantage point – Peartree Common.  I was quite impressed with the photoshop stitch – lined everything up well enough for a ‘screen size’ image.

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Connected

 

The Itchen Toll Bridge, connecting Woolston on the East  (far) with the city side on the West (near).  I shot this at a wide angle so used a perspective crop to straighten the verticals.  I also brightened the shore in the foreground as this had become quite dark in the shade.  The bridge and far shore was lit by a lovely warm evening sun.

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Under the Bridge

A view from under the Itchen Toll Bridge, Southampton, the evening light gives warmth to a cold structure.  This bridge is visible from many spots around the city and will be the focus of the next few posts – something keeps drawing me to photograph it?

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To process or not to process?

The image on the left is not significantly processed, just converted from raw to jpeg.  The image on the right has had quite a bit of work.  Click the images to enlarge and observe the details mentioned below.

As the image was imported from RAW format I used lens correction.  Once in photoshop I used a perspective crop to ‘straighten’ the bridge piers and background buildings (Keystone correction).  This was followed by adjusting the highlights and shadows so that the underside of the bridge contained some detail.  A few sensor spots were ‘healed’ using that brush.  Next the image was sharpened.  I then slightly increased the saturation for the blue areas of the shot using colour select.  Finally I used a noise reduction filter.

The question is then – does the image benefit from the processing or should it be viewed as the camera took it?

Stones Project – Display image

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Each of these stones was photographed individually under studio light conditions with exactly the same camera settings and with the stone in the same position – that way their relative sizes are maintained.

Each of the nine images was converted to black and white before combining them into a single image.  The result is a unique image with a large number of permutations possible even with just these nine stones.

I think this project has some way to run – maybe stones from other beaches or an image of 1000 stones?