The Story
January, 2009. My sister was at the time working in Athens and invited us to go there for a week (check the Meteora II photo story for more details)...
After spending a couple days sightseeing the historical places in Athens, we decided (as advised by our guide, i.e, my sister) to check the Olympic Complex. The Olympic Complex was built for the 2004 Summer Olympic Games, held in Athens, the birthplace of the Olympic Games.
The weather was kinda cloudy, almost rainy, but we decided to go anyway. After all, there isn't as much places to see in Athens as I thought. We picked the subway and when we got there, the first thing that captured my attention was the metallic structures. The main entrance of the Olympic Complex has a big metal structure with fountains around it. We started our visit there. I picked the camera and tried several perspectives with the fountains and the metal structure.
After a few shots, I noticed that the sun was setting in behind one of the pavilions. The sun, the clouds, the water mirror, the trees and the pavilion combined into this picture. I also find the line formed by the lake shore, combined with the lines of the pavilion, quite interesting.
Equipment / Technical Info
Nikon D80
Sigma 10-20mm F4-5.6 EX DC
1/125 second
F/5.6
20 mm
100
Original Photo
Post Processing
I liked this photo almost as it came out of the camera.
A few things were to be corrected, though: the colors were a bit dull and the sky was burn (white, without any color information).
I imported it into Lightroom and applied the Highlight Recovery to the maximum. I then, increased the Contrast and the Vibrance, added some Vignetting and reduced the Luminance for the Oranges, Yellows and Reds. In CS4, I've just increased the Contrast a bit more. That was it.
I should have been more careful in the location and prevented the sky from being burned out. Somethings can't really be recovered in post processing and this is one of them (tip: always expose the photo to prevent the highlights burn out. It's easier to recover the shadows than the highlights).
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/Olympic-Sunset-110254658
1 comentários:
I was checking this blog... thank you so very much for sharing the postprocessing and technical details behind your amazing shots. It really is helpful and I appreciate it. Not a lot of photographers do help others like this.
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