I took the featured photograph a couple of years in the past. That spring, I spent a weekend in San Francisco whereas getting ready to fly again to Montreal after a two-week driving journey by way of California.
I took the featured photograph from Treasure Island, positioned in the midst of San Francisco Bay. Every time I go to the Bay Area, I make certain to search out the time—even whether it is just a few minutes—to absorb certainly one of my favourite metropolis views.
This time, I focused on the colours and architectural patterns of town.
Photographing San Francisco from Treasure Island has its personal set of challenges. The island is roughly 2km away from the portal space of downtown. The distance makes it difficult to discover a focal point in each the foreground and midground. Most of the pictures taken from the island have a boring foreground comprised of water and nothing else.
But I’ve a couple of tips up my sleeve to unravel this downside. Since the channel between the island and town is a busy portal space, it solely takes a couple of minutes till one other cargo ship or barge passes by. It usually makes an attention-grabbing compositional ingredient.
In my case, I didn’t have to attend lengthy for a cargo ship. Instead, I noticed a paddler approaching my location and made positive to incorporate him as a part of the composition.
Plus, the colour distinction between the blue sky, the orange rock, and the inexperienced vegetation was completely breathtaking.
Shooting
I used to be taking pictures hand-held and I used the longest focal size (70mm) of my lens to zoom in on town.
Editing & Processing
It was a single RAW processing workflow.
Lightroom (80%)
My first aim was to enhance the composition by eradicating the empty sky on the prime and the empty water of the bay on the backside. I used the Crop Overlay software to alter the facet ratio from the unique 3 x 3 to extra panoramic orientation with an facet ratio of two x 1.
Next, I used the Natural preset from my Landscape Preset Collection as the bottom for Lightroom Rapid Editing. Then I used TOOLKIT to spice up the Contrast and the Clarity.
The Lightroom Preset Editing Formula: Natural (9, 17, 25, 33)
Photoshop (20%)
In Photoshop the principle aim was to spice up the distinction even additional. I utilized the distinction selectively by making the world of water and sky, ensuring that solely architectural particulars had been affected.
The aggressive distinction resulted in extreme digital noise and I had to make use of a comparatively sturdy noise discount setting to get rid of it.
Plugins: DeNoise (noise discount), Topaz Detail (native distinction enhance).
Total time: 20min