On Tuesday about an hour before sunset we headed out to a lighthouse, right near a public beach, where I got this very “Cape Cod-like” shot (click on it for a much larger view). Same camera and lens as the shot I posted yesterday, but at 50mm, with an exposure of f/11 at 1/20 of a second, shot in Aperture priority mode (I shoot all outdoor shots in Aperture priority so I can control the focus of the background).
NOTE: I had a number of comments and emails yesterday about how yesterday’s photo was post-processed. For the image you see here, and yesterday’s image, I used my “Photoshop Seven Point System” for all image toning, but in yesterday’s image I had to do some serious cloning, because on the right side of the house, you could see the DLWS van in the parking lot, so I cloned that out. But worse yet, on the left side of the house, in front of the front porch, was a huge Army Corp of Engineer’s truck that had to be cloned out, and it took some time, but it was totally ruining the shot.
Although those two things HAD to be removed to save the shot (believe me, I tried recomposing as best I could, but that truck was REALLY big and in just the wrong place), then I cheated a little bit. If you look at the third window from the right on the bottom floor, it looks just like the other windows. In reality, that window was open, and it didn’t look very good, so I copied the window to the left of it up onto its own layer, and then I dragged that nice golden reflection window over the open window, and used Free Transform to shrink it down just a little bit so it was a perfect fit (this “window swap” was much easier than it sounds–it took all of 30-seconds). I did the exact same thing for one of the windows above the front porch–I copied the closed reflecting window to the left of it, and put it over the open window.
Other than the two window swaps, and cloning out the truck and the van, the rest was just toning use my Seven Point System. By the way, I got my first printed copy of the book on Friday right before I left for Detroit, and I was really psyched. Also, if you’re going to PhotoPlus in NYC this week, we can’t promise it, but Peachpit Press has a booth there, and they hope to have a limited number of copies there for sale. Hey, you didn’t hear it from me. ;-)