The Story
April, 2008. After New York, the second part in our US trip was Washington DC. I never thought of visiting DC. New York was always the idea, but after one evening at the movies (I can't remember which movie it was, but the story was in DC) I decided that, if we were to cross the Atlantic to see New York, it would be a waste not to go to DC. So we stayed 4 days in NY and the headed to DC for 3 more days (check the NYC - Times Square photo story for more details on the NY trip).
DC is almost the opposite of NY: it's a very clean, organized, low buildings city. It remembered me of European cities like Paris. It has plenty green spaces, the buildings are monumental and it was kinda hot (in opposition to NY where we freezed) when we were there. It has lots of monuments and we tried to see the most of them.
We traveled by train to DC and it was a very enlightening trip. We passed across Philadelphia and Baltimore on our way to DC. There was one thing that surprised us a lot. If we forget all the glamour of the great cities, the rest of the country is very poor. The suburbs are something unthinkable in European standards: very poor, very dirty, like nothing I can find here in Portugal (which is one of the poorer countries in Europe) except in slums. As the most powerful and most advanced nation in the planet, that kinda shocked me a bit.
Back to DC, we stayed in a very trendy (and noisy, as we found out later) hotel near the center and we mainly walked across the city. One of the spots to see was The Capitol, which, unfortunately, we weren't able to visit inside because all the tickets had been given when we got there. I took some photos there and then we continued our DC visit.
Equipment / Technical Info
Nikon D80
Sigma 10-20mm F4-5.6 EX DC
1/200 second
F/9.0
20 mm
100
Original Photo
Post Processing
January 2010. My daughter was born in the 5th of this month and I was home almost one month now. In a few days I was to return back to work and try to return to my normal life after 4 intense weeks of parenting (it was my first kid). As the work home never stopped (with some 2/3 hours exceptions every now and then) the opportunity to grab the camera and get out was a mirage. So I decided to check some old photos to see if there was any worthy of a second chance. This photo seamed appealing so I decided to give it a shot.
I imported the NEF into Lightroom and started playing around with presets (as usual) and noticed one that I never had tried before: "Awesome BW" preset from synaestheta (you can find it here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/presets/discuss/72157612664073371/). The photo was almost perfect but it still needed some adjustments so I've: increased the Sharpening, reduced the Vignetting, increased the Contrast, the Exposure, the Brightness and the Clarity.
In CS4, I've simply increased the Brightness and the Contrast even more. I tried to increase these settings in Lightroom but, for some reason I can't explain, I didn't managed to get the same satisfactory result there.
And that was it. Basically it's the synaestheta preset with a (small) twist.
Final Photo
Link to image
http://jpgmn.deviantart.com/art/The-Hill-152324661
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