West End Evening

West End Evening
West end evening in Vancouver                                     Buy a limited edition fine art gallery print

This is a west end evening in Vancouver a couple of weeks ago. The lights in the sky are fading and the lights of the city are beginning to glow. This is a popular spot because hundreds of people walk along the shore here in the evening, perhaps ending up on Denman Street for Sushi. I’m standing on a pile of rocks, and about 30 seconds after I shot this I managed to slip and fall. Camera was fine, ego not so much.

Sometimes I get questions regarding how I processed an image to today I thought I’d relate some of the steps.

I used a wide angle zoom lens for this at about 14mm, that gives the sky and water that zoomy effect, basically it causes everything to converge on the middle. I love the effect for landscapes, especially when the main subject is at the center of convergence as the city is here.

I combined three images into AuroraHDR Pro to get an overall dramatic effect to the image. I then applied a texture in the sky and did some final tone mapping in Lightroom, warming it up a tad.

The thing is I never do the same thing twice, every image is unique and the effect is non-repeatable even by me. That’s because there are a hundred other little things that I did that I could never hope to remember, it’s like painting with a brush, on one level it’s completely freeform and one of a kind.

So there you have it. Click, slip, fall and process. That’s my process from start to finish.

Late Night in Barcelona

Late Night in Barcelona
Late Night in Barcelona in Black and White                           Purchase a museum quality print

A late night in Barcelona was spent walking around this section of the city filled with restaurants and Tapas bars. This is another from the series that I’ve posted from the area. It was a film noir kind of atmosphere, such that I expected characters from an old movie to walk by at any moment. That never happened.

Black and white is a medium that evokes more from my imagination. Monochrome compared to color is like radio to video. Radio allows my mind to rush in a fill the void resulting in a more vivid experience. It’s counterintuitive, a case of less is more. So it is with black and white photography. My brain knows the world is colorful so it rushes in to fill a similar void and, unknowingly I’ve become engaged with the image.

In this scene I purposely removed some of the detail, I simplified the image. So that, together with the high contrast tones, the black and white image leaves out information for my mind to fill in. What I fill in is different from you, it’s depends on our personality, psyche and predispositions. Same principal as an ink blot, or looking at clouds, we each see something different. For me, this is a mystery and a puzzle all wrapped into an old movie from the forties. For you, something very different than me.