VPW – Theme – August – In Shadow

I’ve always loved lightning pictures and figured one day I’d get around to trying to capture a few on my own.  I haven’t done the first bit of research on the best way to do this, so there is no technical magic here at all.  However, after going through this exercise and seeing what I can get without knowing what I’m doing, I’m definitely going to do some reading on the subject so I can get better shots with more streamers.  Anyway, here’s sort of the process I went through – I hope you find it informative, or useful or something

There was a pretty big lightning storm in the area so I figured I’d see what I could do with my camera.  First rule is safety, at least to me, it’s no good getting a great shot if you also get fried for it.  So, I set up inside the doorway of my front door, this way I stayed out of the rain, and hopefully safer.  I took about 500 exposures in a 20 minute period, reviewing captures and adjusting settings as I went to try a variety of things – for example, longer shutter speeds to potentially capture more of a bolt.  Out of the 500+ exposures, only two produced a shot with any hint of lightning in it, and this one was the best of the two.  Below is the raw, original image (converted to a .jpg for the web).

I processed the original image in Lightroom.  I found that taking it a B/W image really helped bring out more detail in the bolt.  I added a vignette  simply because I felt like it enhanced the contrast further and helped highlight the bolt.  But as you can see, I already had a few rain drops on the lens that needed to be cleaned up so I pulled the image into Photoshop.

This is one version of the image after PS processing.  I used the HDR toning adjustment to add some radius glow and up the detail a bit, but I didn’t want it really crunchy so I kept it minimal.  I then went over the image in different areas utilizing Dodge and Burn. I liked the result, but I wasn’t uber happy so I started over with a fresh copy and tried again.

This is the final image that I think I liked the best.  There is less “artificiality” about the tree edges, which were apparent in the previous image.  I really like dark, grungy images and I wanted to frame this one with that concept in mind, so I used a lomographic film texture to create a frame around the image and then used the refine edge option in the marquee tool to help blend the two pieces together.  Finally I went back and used the History Brush to bring back in a  bit more frame around the image

As you may have noticed from my collective image set, I tend to love doing processing, but I am wondering whether the results are actually pleasing to anyone but me.  I would love to hear your compare and contrast comments regarding the different versions of this image.  Which one is your favorite?  Least favorite?  Why?  What suggestions would you make to me as an artist that you feel would improve the final results in my processed images?  Do I do too much or not enough?

Thanks! – Artfulori

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 14th, 2010 at 1:07 pm. It is filed under Clouds, Images, VPW2010 and tagged with August Theme, Lightning, Outdoors, Roswell, Sky, Summer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.