Two Red Towers – Traverse City Commons
by James Howe on Sep.06, 2011, under Architecture
(Nikon D700, 28-300mm at 230mm, ISO 100, Exposure 1/250 @ f/16)
On a recent trip to northern Michigan, my wife and I visited Traverse City Commons. I’ve posted shots from this location before. The site is the location of the old Northern Michigan Asylum where they are converting the old buildings into retail, office and residential spaces. The weather the morning we arrived was cloudy, but breaks were beginning to appear in the clouds. As the sun peaked through it shone on the roof tops and really highlighted the towers/cupolas that are a key feature of the main building.
Processing was fairly limited. I had shot the image in landscape orientation, but that left too much sky in the image and I wanted to draw more focus to the structure itself. I cropped in from the right and then did some minor work on the contrast.
Feel free to leave comments or feedback below.
Copyright ©2011 James W. Howe – All rights reserved
Buick Roadmaster
by James Howe on Sep.02, 2011, under Automobiles
(Olympus E-3, 14-54mm at 27mm (2x crop factor), ISO 100 Exposure 1/160th @ f/7.1)
I’ve been going through my Lightroom catalog looking for interesting things to post to my Google + account and I came across this shot that I took at the Gilmore Car Museum in 2008. The car is a Buick Skylark Roadmaster, but I don’t know the year. I’ve just always liked this shot, the combination of red, black and chrome.
The image didn’t quite start out with such a nice background. As seen below, the car was sitting on a driveway and you can see grass and pavement. The shape of the car was pretty easy to mask around, so basically I just blacked out all the parts that I didn’t like. I finished things up by desaturating some of the colors in the chrome on the bumper, especially to remove the green from the surrounding area. I think it makes the chrome stand out better.
Please feel free to leave any comments, questions or feedback below.
Copyright ©2008-2011 James W. Howe – All rights reserved.
Port Oneida Farmstead
by James Howe on Aug.30, 2011, under Michigan
(Nikon D700, 28-300mm at 100mm, ISO 200, Exposure 1/125 @ f/16)
Port Oneida is an historic farming area in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. The area has an interesting collection of old farmhouses and out buildings. My wife and I were driving through the area on a less beaten path when we came across this farmstead. There was a farmhouse off to the right which was interesting, but I thought these two buildings had more character.
I had a couple of goals when processing this image. First, I wanted to tone down the patch of blue sky in the upper left corner of the image. Converting to black and white helped, as did adding a vignetted. However it still left a big bright spot in the upper corner so I used a technique that I had learned from watching some videos at The Mindful Eye, a web site run by Craig Tanner. Craig will oftentimes use selective scaling to make minor alterations to his landscape shots. I selected an area of the trees in the left corner and scaled them up a bit. I touched things up with a bit of cloning and did a minor crop of the image and the end result is that I was able to get rid of most of the sky. I also used some curves layers to selectively brighten and darken elements in the image. In the initial black and white conversion the building sort of blended in with the trees, so I used curves to brighten the building a bit. I also brightened some elements of the trees as well since they also were a bit flat from the conversion.
Copyright ©2011 James W. Howe – All rights reserved
Mackinac Bridge
by James Howe on Aug.25, 2011, under Michigan
(Nikon D700, 70-300mm at 195mm, ISO 200, Exposure 15 sec @ f/32)
The Mackinac Bridge in northern Michigan is the third longest suspension bridge in the world and is the longest suspension bridge in the western hemisphere. The suspension part of the bridge is 8921 feet and the total length of the bridge is 26, 372 feet. The bridge was built to connect Michigan’s lower and upper peninsulas. The bridge spans the Straits of Mackinac which is where Lake Michigan meets Lake Huron. The concept for a bridge at this location had been pondered since 1884, but wasn’t built until 1954. The bride opened to traffic in 1957. One of the fun events surrounding the bridge is the annual Labor Day ‘Bridge Walk’. Each Labor Day, half of the bridge is dedicated to foot traffic and you can walk the bridge starting on the north side. The middle lanes of the bridge are made out of a steel grate to let the wind pass through. As you walk across the bridge, it is interesting to look down through the grate at the water below. If you’re lucky, a freighter might be passing under the bridge at the time.
This image was taken on a recent trip to northern Michigan. My wife and I had just come from the island (Mackinac Island) and we were headed out of town. We stopped at a local park so I could get some pictures of the bridge. It was a breezy day with some nice clouds so I thought I would try to take a long exposure aided by my 10 stop ND filter. Even at f/32 and 10 stops, the best I could get was a 15 second exposure. I think it did a nice job with the clouds, but it would have been nicer to have an even longer exposure, I think. Processing included cleaning up a ton of dust spots (I think from the sensor and not the filter), creating more of a panoramic crop and some basic image adjustments in Photoshop using onOne’s PhotoTools product.
Comments or questions? Feel free to leave them below.
Copyright ©2011 James W. Howe – All rights reserved.
Mackinac Island Evening
by James Howe on Aug.24, 2011, under Michigan
(Nikon D700, 28-200mm at 28mm, ISO 200, Exposure 2 minutes @ f/22)
I recently purchased a B+W 10 Stop ND filter and I’ve been looking for opportunities to try it out. My wife and I were on vacation last week and one evening I decided to try my hand at a long exposure landscape shot. I’m still learning the tricks to making long exposures work so this shot was as much of an experiment as anything. The sun was setting on the other side of the island but I had noticed that there were some clouds that were going to get some of the late sunlight. I headed to a spot which I thought might make an interesting composition and set up. I took a couple practice shots and then put on the 10 stop filter. The exposure was 2 minutes.
Post processing involved working to lighten up the tree area on the left which was rather dark in the raw image. I spent a little time with some curves layers trying to adjust the brightness/contrast of the rocky area in the foreground as well. I’m still contemplating a black and white version as well.
If you have any questions, comments or constructive feedback, please feel free to leave it below.
Copyright ©2011 James W. Howe – All rights reserved