SiO 2018 - Day Nineteen.

A bog-standard image today led me to play in PP. This was opened in Aurora as a single-shot HDR. I then sent it (internally as a plugin) to Topaz Black & White Effects and chose a slightly faded and cartoon effect.

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Sometimes ones plans go awry, which is what happened this morning. I had hoped that Matt and Tim, the farm labourers from Croft Farm would have been over early to deposit more silage in the feeder in a field close to me so that the feeding cattle would have been round it caught in the rays of the rising sun. Whilst they duly arrived early their plan was to move the cattle to a new field so I had to photograph them moving off into the rising sun without the benefit of it actually illuminating the subject. This meant a difficult image to deal with. I made some some basic adjustments in RawTherapee including conversion to monochrome, resizing and cropping to a 16:9 format. I did consider a wider panoramic crop to 16:7 but felt the loss of the tiny cloud detail detracted from the image. I then had my work cut out in GIMP. The sky was selected with a feathered selection, then inverted and with the sky being untouched I worked on the foreground mainly with the brightness/contrast tool to raise the levels and bring some contrast to it. If the sky had also remained selected the tiny cloud detail was lost as the levels of the sky were raised towards white. When I was satisfied I deselected the foreground and made some global adjustments using the exposure tool, adjusting both the black point and the exposure. This is the result.

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Moving to pastures new

Matt and Tim in the farm utility vehicle are tempting the cattle to follow with the promise of some diet supplements. I was able to hide the rising sun behind the high hedge on the right hand side of the image but the foreground was still quite deep in shadow and gave some post processing issues as detailed above. The techniques to resolve these issues in GIMP were a learning curve to me with subtle differences from using the same processes in Photoshop, hopefully the resulting image was worth the effort.


Barrie
 
Day 19 and a bit special - I visited my parents in my hometown Turku and shot Cathedral, Mother Church of Evangelist Lutheran Church of Finland. First build in the very end 1200, perhaps 1296 from wood. The church was then burned for ruins and rebuild from stone, probably 1318. At that time it was of course a Catholic Church, Martin Luther lived and affected to protestant reformation of the Catholic Church a bit later :D

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This was all I could grab today after seventeen hours of non-stop hustle and bustle (most of it was bringing the kids home safely ...). The funny thing is, my idea almost worked. This is a >1" exposure, hand-held (at f/5.6, too, and close to the minimal focus distance of the lens). I expected quite a bit more blur and even less helpful framing because the finder is a) less accurate and b) much too conservative at close distances. And I didn't arrange this, either, I really don't have the faintest idea how the spot lighting happened.

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I know it's a crap shot, but it came out better than I thought it would, and I actually think it captures the essence of the moment rather well ...

M.
 
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