Old fashion: sport car

Hi everyone,

Yesterday I went to the Army museum in Rome with the canoniani.it roman community. Nice place, nice people couldn't drive anywhere else than nice pictures!!!



Shooting details:
Canon 40D with Tamron 90mm f/2.8 Macro
f/3.2 , 1/60s, ISO 400

Production tricks in Lightroom, mainly:
1. White balance
2. Tone adjustment to increase the fill light
3. Vibrance + 15; clarity to + 50
4. Sharpening with strenght 100 radius 0.6
5. Adjustment brush on the top left with exposure -0.6 as it was too bright. Mainly this is aimed to decrease the attention on the far top to drive the eyes in the middle of the composition
6. I removed in photoshop all wires in the bottom left part of the car. All agin to keep the composition as clean as possible!

Look up There

Shooting Details:
Canon 40D with Tamron 17-50 If Di at 17mm
1/60s at f/4 ISO 400
Canon speedlite 430 EX

Easy shot taken after dinner at Marghe and Fuffy playing.
What I particularly like is that both are looking at something outside the composition in a very symmetrical way (note their opposite "arms" up).
The Rule of Thirds is also respected, with both faces in one top intersection and Fuffy being in like with one vertical.

Marghe Pop Art

Photoshop by Marghe

Fresh from Marghe's Photoshop

Ciao,



It's ART time :-)
Marghe sitting on my desk for a full day, from 10am in the morning till late night to learn photoshop and at the same time create this.
Don't ask me how many attempts she did - all looked very similar ... but not perfect in her stylist mind!
Don't ask me who cooked that Sunday ... or if I managed to go out ... NO CHANCE :-)

[Poll 1] Help us improving

[Week 2] The Photoshop artist

Very little retouching for this portrait of my girlfriend Marghe shot at home with a good white background :-)



Shooting details:
Canon 40D with Tamron 90mm f/2.8 Di Macro and Canon Speedlite 430EX
f/3.2 , 1/60s, ISO 250

Few comments:
1. I have no clue why I could not set a faster speed for the Speedlite. Seriously 1/60s is really slow. Lucy me this one got nice :-)
2. I bounced the light on my ceiling. White big are to reflect it and mixed with ambient light. I like when I manage to find the right flash parameters to merge the ambient and the flashgun light. It's way better as it avoids these totally dark background typical of point and shoot cameras
3. The Tamron 90mm Macro lens work better than I originally thought for portraiture ... I am impressed, waiting for the bucks to get a good dedicated lens :-)

Lightroom adjustments:
1. White balance (yep, to warm it up a bit)
2. Softening the skin with a negative clarity of abt -0.5 applied with a soft adjustment brush
3. Whitening teeth, always by adjustment brush, but with negative saturation this time
4. Sharpening the eye on focus (amount 100, radius 0.6)

That's it! :-)
Comments are welcome

[Week 1] Imperia Oneglia, Porto

On time for the first picture!
Marghe and I were in Imperia for Christmas and this is one of the first pictures I processed in Lightroom. Hope you'll like it. I do, even if sets the bar high for the yearly project of 1 photo / week :-)



Imperia Oneglia, Porto

Shooting details:
Canon 40D with Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 Xi Di
f/5.6 , 1/100s, ISO 200
Polarizer filter (the MVP)

I added few post production tricks in Lightroom, mainly:
1. Cooled down the overall light temperature (I had a very warm cast)
2. Increased the foreground light (it was too dark) with a soft brush and +1 exposure setting.
3. Vibrance + 15
4. Sharpening with strenght 100 radius 0.6
5. Small crop to keep focus on the subject [there were objects entering in the frame from top left and bottom right]

2010 Project - One photo / week

In 2009 I set this blog up ... but had no commitment to fill it up.
In 2010 I will do it. Promised :-)

I'll start with a One photo / week project, sharing good pictures from my trips or cool exercises I'll do playing around.

Note: All my pictures will be uploaded in Flickr and then linked back to the Blog.
Since the usual resolution for a reflex camera is 3:2 I will reduce all pictures to 819x546 or better

width="819" height="546"