D 184 - Ablaze

Another photo of a big fire.

Equipment

E-510 with ZD1442.
RAW edited in Lightroom.

D 182 - Fire

Burning down an old desk.

Equipment

E-510 with ZD1442.
RAW edited in Lightroom.

D 132 - By the fire

First campfire of this season.

Equipment

E-510 with ZD1442.
RAW file edited in Lightroom: levels, split toning, crop from 4:3 to 3:2 format, noise and sharpness adjustments.

What I learned

I played around with different automatic presets and programs in my camera. This time I wanted to check out the 'By the Candles' scene mode. It used smaller ISO and aperture than I would. It surprised me with using simply 'Daylight' white balance but it gave a nice result.

D 59 - Hide behind

Ah! The beauties of my city. Major chimneys can be easily used for orienteering in the industrial areas.
This one is the same one that I can see from my window. "Blink, blink!" my son calls them, for the red lights they flash against the night sky.
Here it is seen from a platform in front of my office.

Equipment

Samsung S630.

I didn't like the way it looked on the camera LCD and with a 3Mpix I shot it with (for the sake of saving memory card space) I didn't think it would be any good.

In Lightroom I cropped it by around 20% and pushed up saturation a little. The clouds merged with sky too much, so I had to adjust levels and increase clarity. I also used a gradual filter at the bottom which increased contrast but took off some saturation and clarity for the smog look.

What I learned

I must admit that I'm a bit confused by what to think and what to say about if my photographs have been "photoshopped" or not. I don't ever use Photoshop, when I need to work on layers I go for GIMP, which would be the same thing actually. The thing is I don't use it on more than 1% of my photos.

It would seem that I don't edit my pictures, right? But I do. Not a single photo on this blog can be called straight-out-of-camera. I adjust levels, sharpness, white balance and quite often I re-crop in Lightroom (usually by less than 10% of the frame size). This was why I started to shoot RAW in the first place.

So what is the real photo and what is "photoshop" work? Not that is matters to me, but people ask and I always hesitate what to say.

D 1

Od Dark Light Back

This is the view outside my window at 7:45 a.m. First sunlight barely illuminating the smoke from a central heating plant. This was a lucky day. Winds usually push this smoke completely sideways and today it was heading right for me.

Equipment
 
Taken with Helios 44-4 - a good old Russian 58mm lens - on my Olympus E-510. That was 126mm with 4/3 System crop factor of 2x. And the quality suffered from taking it hand-held.

What I learned?

In less than perfect light conditions even supporting that fast lens is not enough to get a sharp photo even with higher ISO and Shake Reduction.