The Story
December, 2008. It was Christmas time and my wife, who likes this season (in contrast with me that couldn't care less), convinced me to go to downtown Lisboa to see the Christmas lights. In this time of the year Lisboa is fully decorated with lights on the streets, some say it's the spirit of the season, other would say that it's another way of drawing consumers away from the shopping centers. Anyway, we went to Lisboa. I took the usual gear: the D80 and the Sigma 10-20.
This Sigma lens allows me to shoot with significant lower shutter speed than any other lens that I own (Tip: the common rule is that you can shoot in the inverse proportion of the focal length. With this 10mm lens it means that you can shoot with 1/10 seconds speed and have a good possibility that the photo wouldn't get blurred).
We parked in the Restauradores square and then went thru' Rossio, Rua Augusta and Comércio square. Near Comércio square you have a smaller square that is where the city hall is: Município square. I took some shots of the city hall and then, when we were heading back to Comércio, I've noticed the BUS letters on the pavement. I was, at the time, exploring the lines in the photos and also the Dutch Tilt perspectives. Without too much preparation, always on the move (my wife was getting kinda bored of my photographic stops all along the way) I tried to get a good perspective on this street.
It was already nighttime and the lightning on this street wasn't that generous, so I raised the ISO to 400 and took advantage of the 10mm to capture the low light street. I only took this photo of this spot.
Equipment / Technical Info
Nikon D80
Sigma 10-20mm F4-5.6 EX DC
1/13 second
F/4.0
10 mm
400
Original Photo
Post Processing
This photo walk gave me some good photos and this particular photo was in the lower half of that list. It had almost every reason to get rejected: it was too dark and it was to noisy from the low light and high ISO. I really don't like photos with low detail, I prefer when I look at a photo a can see all the details on it. But this photo was the best one from the ones that had lines and the BUS word on it (I took some others in Rossio). I decided to give it a shot anyway, if it was a bad call I would loose €1.
Let me explain this €1 stuff... Since I entered the digital photography world that I stopped printing photos. With the exception of some vacations photos that my wife would print, I never had printed some of my photos before. One day, after buying the Nikon D80 (I had a Sony DSC-V3 compact camera before), I decided to print some of the Nikon photos because we were preparing to go on holidays and I didn't wanted to have any bad surprise afterward. So I selected a few photos and had them printed in several formats. One of the formats was Mate 20x30 (cm). I was amazed with the result. From that point on, I decided that I would print on that format all the photos that I would publish. Each print costs about €1 :) This way I could feel the photos in my hands and also would make me (at least most of the times) be more selective of what I publish.
Well, back to post processing, I imported the file into Lightroom and first of all I cropped it to my like. Then I increased the Exposure, the Blacks and the Contrast. The sky was still a bit electric blue so I reduced the Saturation and the Luminance of the Blues to the minimum.
It was still with low contrast so I started to try some presets. I ended up choosing "Matt's Sin City - Light Red" preset (you can get it here: http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/2008/presets-sin-city-look-sort-of/). That was it for Lightroom, so I moved on to CS3 and there I've: converted to Black & White (Red Filter preset) and done some Auto Tone, Auto Contrast and Auto Color.
I usually publish my photos with 1024px in the largest size and use a great Photoshop action by Manyk to do the re-size.
You can find it here: http://manyk.deviantart.com/art/Web-Sharpening-with-Photoshop-29038461
Final Photo
Link to image
http://jpgmn.deviantart.com/art/BUS-106221441
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