Organic Wine Cellar
New Journal 14 – Catching up & HDR Book
As the Chilean border still remains closed, we’ll be using today to catch up on things we haven’t had the time to do recently. My blog needs updating slightly.
I’m going to organise the chapters of my HDR book. I started writing it 9 months ago. It has been a slow process. Some people can fire books out at an incredible speed. It amazes me. I think I need to find a way to be more time efficient. My plan is to release it in November as a large reference manual for HDR photography.
We were approached not that long ago by a company interested in sponsoring Through Strange Lenses. I wasn’t sure if it was something I was interested in but I listened to their offer. One of the questions they asked was ‘How big is your readership?’
I’ve actually spoken about this before and many months later I still have no idea how to quantify it. While I have regular visitors to the blog, most of my readers are on facebook which is impossible to measure. I get regular commenters to my posts on facebook who I’ve slowly come to know over the months, but every couple of posts I’ll get a comment from someone who I’ve never heard of who says they’ve been following my work for a while. It’s great when that happens, because in my head I wonder how many silent readers I have. The optimistic side of me hopes my readership is in the trillions. The realistic side has a somewhat lower figure, but I let myself dream anyway.
In the end, I had to answer with a simple shrug of the shoulders. I suppose I’m more curious to know what brings people back to my blog. Is it the information in posts and the before/after images? my journal entries? or the images themselves? or a combination of all 3?
If you wouldn’t mind taking the time to let me know, I’d certainly like to hear your opinions.
The Cool Bits – Technical Info
Processing Time: 1 hour
Processing method: Photoshop & Photomatix
No. of Exposures: 3
EV Range: -2 0 +2
Aperture: f/9.1
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 10mm
Lens: Sigma 10-20mm
Camera: Canon 60d
Plugins: Nik Color Efex for, Detail extraction and shift in lighting & Topaz Clarity for contrast adjustments
Luminance Masks: N/A
Photomatix Settings: Default, Strength 90, Saturation 35, Luminosity 2, Detail Contrast 2.5, Lighting Adjustments 6, Gamma 80
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Today’s Photo – Organic wine cellar
This is an image of a large wine container in the only organic winery in Mendoza, owned and ran by an Argentinian artist with whom we had the pleasure of sharing a glass of vino.
Compositionally, for this image, I wanted to give the wine chamber a surreal slant. That’s why the image was taking from about chest height pointing down, allowing some cool lens distortion on the barrel to the left and the shelf to the right. The atmosphere I wanted to achieve was that of an old cellar where artists would smoke cigars, drink wine and chat about politics and art. All that was missing was some dense smoke hovering around the ceiling.
Reminder – Download Luminance Mask Actions
You can download my 18 point luminance mask actions for Photoshop completely free – [wpdm_file id=1]
Before the Joys of Post-Processing
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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 30th, 2013 at 2:44 pm
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All three – your images are quality, the before and afters are revealing and you write really well – interesting to read.
“your silent follower”
Haha, thanks a lot for taking the time to comment Alistair. I appreciate it.
Another silent follower here. I really enjoy looking at your realistic HDR photos and the stories that come with them. The before and after is also great and I’m very interested in your luminance mask technique!