Tech Info: Nikon D90 | 50mm | ISO 200 | f/5.6 | 1/20 sec
You might enjoy this in large.
This was shot during our flight to Yellowstone National Park in sep 2009. The flight had just taken off and was headed east which meant some lovely morning light. For the first few minutes, I just sat there at the window gazing at these awesome cloud formations and completely forgot that I had the camera in my hand. After I realized what an idiot I was, then it was so much fun in trying to capture these.
I’m back from exile. It all started with couple of my friends visiting our place in Feb. We had such a great time. It was just like living those school/college days again. After they left, I had no mood to just sit in front of a computer. My day job requires me sitting in front of it and the moment I was done for the day, I would just shut off completely. Add to this the cricket world cup, where the Indian team seems to be making a thriller out of every match. Once all that energy is lost, it’s too difficult to motivate myself to work on any photos. So that’s the reason for my online absence 🙂
In a way this break was nice as I feel a lot refreshed and have completely given up hope on the Indian team reaching the semis (though a part of me still hopes for it…dammit). Also I recently finished a city walk photography workshop and interacting with the participants always gets my juices flowing.
Processing: By the time I took this picture, I had made myself rely more on the histogram data rather the preview of the LCD screen on the back of the camera. If I had just one by the preview, I would have deleted the image right there. Since the histogram showed a nice data distribution, the thought of something can be made out of this was pretty strong. And sure it really was very easy to work with and here is how it was done:
- Imported the raw file in Lightroom and gave it a warmer color temperature. Also it got a little boost in blacks, clarity and vibrance than the default values of lightroom. Had to crank up the noise reduction to get rid of the noise. Exported as a smart object to Photoshop CS4.
- Added a curves adjustment to get some contrast.
- Resized for the web.
- Added a smart sharpen layer with very tiny values.
- Saved as a 8 bit jpeg and added keywords, metadata through Bridge.
Before:
After: