Canon 5D mark II
Tamron 70-300mm F/4
Cokin 0.9 Grad ND Filter
0.4 second, F32

From FXGuide

“We understand that EOS 5D Mark II users desire additional frame rates and we’re preparing a firmware update to allow the camera to shoot at both 24P and 25P,” said Chris Macleod, Brand Manager – EOS, Canon Australia. “The upgrade to 24P and 25P will broaden the usage scope for this popular camera to include cinema and broadcast applications, respectively.”

Canon expects the firmware update to be available in the first half of 2010 and will release more details as they become available.

Probably the best Canon news of the evening for me (don’t forget the 1D mark IV was announced!). But seriously, first half of 2010?

About the picture above?

Took an evening trip to watch the sun go down at Great Falls Park and did a small hike to the water side to watch some kayakers. I set up my tripod and as the sun went down, the sky turned pink and I felt like it was winter already!

Luckily the clear skies picked up some clouds to add a little more to the image. Unfortunately, the Grad ND filter I used really made the purple/pink seem a little too much/distracting than it was in real life. I may fix it in lightroom one day.

Photo of the Grand Canyon at Desert View By Tony Eckersley

Recently, I have received a lot of messages on Flickr asking to see my work flow for post processing images and how I use Photoshop or Lightroom. When I first started taking photography more seriously, I already had a 4 year graphic design degree behind me and 4 years working in an Branding Agency meaning that my experiences with Photoshop and post processing had been quite high (theoretically anyway). But the main reason behind my knowledge of Photoshop comes not from my work experience or my degree, but through something the majority of us have access to; the internet.

The internet is one of the greatest tool out there for Photographers – as is taking full advantage of online communitiesy. Between my father, Neil Coffey, Matthew Langley and the internet, I have learned more aboutthe technical side of photography and the photo than any school could have ever taught me. When it comes to the internet, there are so many great tutorials out there, and just as photographers like Chase Jarvis have developed, the idea of Photographers sharing their experiences, knowledge and know-how is the essence of how the photography online community works. The internet has allowed me to develop my photography skills because of photographers/professionals like Chase Jarvis, David Hobby, David Nightingale, Joe McNally and Scott Kelby and their willingness to share is a tool any photographer, professional, amateur and people just starting out, should be taking notice of.

On that note, I wanted to share with you my work flow for a popular image I have on Flickr and my portfolio of photographs. As I mentioned at the beginning, I do get a few emails asking how I edited an image to give vibrant colors, or sky definition, particularly on this image. I use Lightroom 2, which is quite frankly the best piece of software I have ever used. This little walk through is setting up a photo to be printed, but also looks pretty decent on screen, which are two very different things – I know it sounds obvious, but correcting color for each is quite a challenge.

Not surprisingly (I hope), it all starts with the original photograph.

Please click this to read about how I edit photos

Step 1 – The original photograph

Immediately you can see there is quite a jump from the shot above to the final photo featured as the header for this post. The photo was originally taken with a Canon 5D mkII with a Canon EF 24-70mm F/2.8L lens with a 0.9 Graduated ND Filter from Cokin. The scene was actually quite dark, so an exposure time of 30 seconds at F/11 was used at ISO 100 with a focal length of 35mm. A Tripod was also used. I always shoot in RAW, and I do tend to find the RAW images that come out of the Canon EOS Camera, are never quite as “vibrant” as when shooting with a Nikon, but that’s ok, as we shoot in RAW to have full control over the final image.

Step 2 – The composition

I get quite weird with composition. Personally, I see very wide with my images, and when I compose, I initially look from left to right before thinking the whole scene. I believe this is because I grew up seeing compositions in wide screen movies, but regardless, I am a fan of the wide composition. I do traditionally try and keep to the classic “think in thirds” rule that you can ultimately see in the cropped image more so than the original. I also try to get it right in camera first. I don’t like to crop too much, and although I have 21 mega pixels to play with, I like the majority of them to stay in the image.

Step 3 – The White Balance

I remember shooting in Zion National Park with my full gear, tripod, Canon 5D mkII, Big 70-200mm F/2.8L IS, filters etc, and this guy with his Canon 10D asked me what white balance setting I was using. He literally laughed at me when I said I leave it on AWB (Auto White Balance). I believe some believe and think this is a major sin! But this is why I shoot in RAW. I don’t trust the camera settings on all the other auto settings as I can just as easily process the white balance in the image in Lightroom as I remember it in person. I have much better control this way. But White Balance is how I start editing my photos. In this image, I added some Warmth to the Temperature and increased the Tint to stay consistent with the image’s color. I increased the warmth in the image as my Cokin Filters tend to make the images a little cooler, plus the time of day, just after the sun set, has this beautiful red hue to it. I don’t want to over do the warmth however, as it will have adverse effects for the next step.

Step 4 – Contrast

As I said earlier, in my experience, Canon’s RAW image lacks a bit of kick. I like to bring this back to what I saw in person by increasing the contrast slightly. This will give some vibrance to the colors, making those red’s more defined, the light’s more bright and the shadow’s more dark. We again don’t want to go too overboard with contrast, as while at first it may look cool on screen, but you have to be careful when printing. You can see in the image above that the shadows do look darker and the reds have more of a punch on the canyon wall, but this will change depending on how you have calibrated your monitor and your settings in Lightroom. I recommend some reading on setting both of these up before editing.

Step 5 – Bring back my Graduated Filter!

I used a 0.9 Grad ND filter on this image, but I found the actual location and time to be the wrong conditions to properly expose the image using the Grad ND filter. As it was getting close to being very dark, there was no real chance of having a fully overexposed sky while keeping the canyon exposed correctly. And while you can see in the original image, the sky is a little darker where the ND filter was doing it’s job, it’s not as defined as I wanted it to be. I really wanted to underexpose the sky a little more to bring out the definition and color in the clouds and the fallen sun. So I selected the graduated filter from the tools in Lightroom and set it at -1.5 and dragged it down from the top of the image to were I knew my filter ended on the camera. I then added a second filter in lightroom diagonally from the top left hand corner to really define the orange.

Step 6 – Clarity and Vibrance

I have a bad habit of using the Clarity tool too often to rescue poor photographs as it does help bring out the details. I have since learned to use it subtly to drive home some detail. The problem I had with the original image is that due to the climate that day and the controlled fires on the north and south rim, some of the detail was lost on the Canyon walls. While adding contrast works, I find adding a touch of ‘clarity’ does wonders to a shot like this. Those tiny cracks and rough edges in on the wall have much more definition and becomes much more like the image we see in person. I also increased the vibrance a little to boost those colors a little more

Step 7 – Final Edits

At this stage, I start all over again. I revisit each of the above stages to re work the image to it’s final outputted state. So, for the final image, once the initial edits are done, I rework the cropping, adding a little more foreground, I added a bit more warmth to the image to compensate for the vibrance we added, I reduced the effect of the Graduated Filter to give a more true feel to the photo. Once that is done, I take a look at some of the finer details. I will take a look at the Hue, Saturation and Luminance for each color and tweak any as necessary. For example, I boosted the magenta slightly in this image to give it more presence when printing. I then do some tweaking to the Sharpening as the RAW image tends to be a little soft. If needed I will reduce noise, but that was not necessary in this photo. After that I will look at my histogram to make sure it looks correct and we have no blow highlights or lost shadow detail. Then I take a look to see if I need to adjust the Highlights, Lights, Darks and Shadows at all.

So there we have it – that’s my work flow of editing a RAW image in Lightroom 2. I hope it was helpful you all those who asked, and to those comparing.

Please feel free to ask a question in my comments, or leave any feedback.

This is one of my favorite shots from the Recent Road Trip

Ok, I admit, a little bit of Photoshopping was done here. Basically I had taken a 300 second exposure of the stars just as the sun was rising, but during that time, a car drove right in front of me (lights on causing an awful streak and flare in my photo). The stars came out fine, but the foreground was less than satisfactory. So, I took an exposure of the foreground without the car and combined the two images.

Not exactly how I wanted to do it as I don’t like to do too much post production (get it right in camera etc.), but this was the image I wanted. Also, excuse the awful JPEG compression. RAW looks lovely!

This was shot with my Canon 5D mark II, EF 24-70mm F/2.8L and a 0.9 Graduated ND filter.

View the original size to really see what you are looking at.

I don’t know what it is, but out of the three times I have visited Bryce Canyon National Park, I have never been happy with any photo I have taken of the place.

Maybe it’s because I don’t spend enough time there? All three times I have barely experienced this great park for what it really means. Hiking down in the Hoodoo’s is amazing, but I feel I need to explore more – find those areas that really attract me artistically.

This is 10 portrait shots merged together from sunset point. I used a Grad 0.9 ND filter to expose the shadows and sky (almost gives it that HDR look I guess – But definately not HDR!). It’s not my favorite, but for now, it’s the best I feel I have from Bryce Canyon.

The sky looks dirty because it is. The biggest controlled fires between various different parks was happening while we were there and you can really tell from the sky.

When we were at Monument Valley, we had a lot of trouble taking photos. The dust from the high winds was incredible. It would be everywhere, eyes, nose, mouth, ears… Became very annoying after a while. This photo is taken approximately half way around the 7 mile off round drive, which I recommend you all do.

On the flip side, the photos came out pretty unique. Everything had a redish hue to it and I feel adds to the strange atmosphere that is Monument Valley. I love how the clouds almost form their own butte formation, similar to the ‘mitten’ here.

Just as the sun went down I took this shot. I just loved all the colors.

A little bit about this photo? Sure!

This has been taken from Desert View on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon about 15 minutes after the sun dropped below the horizon. For me, it’s when the Canyon comes alive with color and is easily my favorite time to shoot there. As this is a popular view point, expect a lot of tourists to be hanging around during sunset hours, but it suddenly becomes very peaceful as most of them leave as soon as the sun is no longer visible. You are left with this beautiful, quiet, colorful view that you can just enjoy.

Very little post production done on this photo – most of it was out of the camera. I had a 0.9 Grad ND filter (Cokin Filter System) on my 24-70mm F/2.8 with the shutter open for 3 seconds at F/11. I applied a bit of saturation (and clarity – seems to make the Grand Canyon pics pop a little more) and increased the temp and recovery a little.

This is NOT a HDR. The exposure is purely from the effects of the grad ND filter.

I have started to reduce JPG quality and size of my uploaded files as I have found sources taking my larger images and putting them as available wallpaper on their sites – Not cool. Soon my prints will be prints will be available to view over here in Northern Virginia where they can be bought.

I’m on the twitter if you want to follow me and keep up with my escapades

Believe it or not, not too much post production was done on this photo. It was actually an experiment by adding 2 Grad ND filters (0.9 and 0.6) to see what would happen. The canyon itself exposed pretty well and it allowed the smoke coming in from controlled fires to be a little over exposed.

Granted, the sky was darker (no wonder with all those filters on) but I could not find a happy medium at the time. It looks a lot like a HDR (which I am not a fan of these days, even though I wrote a positive post about it last month) unfortunately, but that’s all because of the grad ND’s

In Lightroom I added some clarity to define the canyon a little more (with some contrast added) and altered the exposure (the ND’s made it dark) and white balance. Some increased saturation was added too

It’s so great to wake up to this when camping in Monument Valley.

I think this was the most comfortable sunrise I have ever witnessed. This was the view from the back of our camper so I set my tripod up, and sat in bed and shot away!

I really liked the purple in the sky on this particular morning after the stars were no longer visible. This purple haze only lasted 2 or 3 minutes before the colors of sun over powered it. Glad I caught it when I did. It was taken about 10 minutes after <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/tonysphotographs/3853915481/sizes/o/”>this shot</a> which is one of my favorites from the whole trip!

I had to do some mild photoshopping to remove a car that decided to park right in front of my tripod.

Something a little different from me today… trying to keep my motivation high…

I remember a Travel documentary I saw about 5 years ago on the BBC and it was asking people if they had one word to describe the Grand Canyon, what would that word be?

Most people’s choice? "Awesome".

It’s very true. Every time I visit the Grand Canyon I will always overhear people who wonder to the edge, take a moment to look over the vast canon and then exclaim, "Awesome". I admit that I have done the same thing.

But my favorite thing about this place is it’s color. Like many of the famous wonders of the world, the Taj Mahal in Agra, India, the Pyramids in Giza, Egypt, etc, every hour in the Grand Canyon is a different experience as it is always changing color depending on where the sun is. The colors in the Grand Canyon are incredible unique especially at the ‘magic hours’ for Photography. I prefer the sunrise over the sunset in the Grand Canyon. It has this magical feel to it and everyone who has braved the cold and early hour to see it will just sit in silence and watch this great event. In fact I think it’s the only time the Grand Canyon’s tourists are quiet!

The above photo was taken at 5.30am just before the sun was about to rise over the horizon and these beautiful purples, magentas, blues, oranges and reds came together for this incredible mix. What you see here is pretty much what I saw there. I pumped up some of the vibrancy in the photo as it wasn’t as accurate as I saw at that moment.

If you are at the Grand Canyon for an overnight stay, it’s a must that you get up at sun rise to witness the beauty.

This was taken with my Canon 5D mk II with a 24-70mm F/2.8L with an aperture of F/8 (anything higher else was leaving glare on the image) for 0.4 second to grab this exposure.