[matthew]

I shot this in the early evening two days ago, and like the feel of it. It was taken with a wide-angle lens, shot with a -2EV bias for the scene and a +2EV boost to the fill flash, which was zoomed and angled to just hit the signs. I've never tried shooting a street sign like this before.

[Banded Drake]

I really like this shot Matthew , but i do have to say that i get a little " woosy " looking at it .

No really i do like the perspective , intersting angle to look at . Nice work

....... Shawn

[matthew]

Thanks, Shawn. I'm not usually a big fan of angles and wacky perspectives, so this is something new for me. It's not going to be a mainstay of my technique, but it was fun to play with it.

[Zig]

Now, I do like this: a great example of the power of mono, enabling the lines, forms and textures to be the mainstay.
Furthermore, I'm inspired by that tone too...almost like highish-grade selenium print and redolent of advertising shots of yesteryear.
Matthew, would you be kind enough to tell us how you processed it, please?

[Zig]

Hmm...darn thoughtful lighting too; well done mate!

[Don Schaeffer]

Very arty! Looks like an ad for a movie.

[matthew]

Thanks, I really appreciate both of your praise. Since this image reminds me of both of your own work, it means a lot.

The processing was fairly simple. Here's the original, straight-from-camera jpeg:



I processed the raw original using lightroom. When I import it, I use a preset configuration that's supposed to make the colour and tone response look like the camera's own engine. (Ironic, isn't it?) Comparing them now, I can see that the LR version has higher contrast and shifted the blue more toward magenta, but otherwise they're pretty close. The image was cropped for composition, and then I switched to the grayscale conversion setup.

It's actually hard for me to retrace exactly what I did with it, even though Lightroom saves every setting change. I played around with the controls a lot to get the look of the image the way I wanted it: increased the exposure, lightened the lower-mid-tones, pulled the blacks blacker, pushed the highlights down, and generally fiddled with it to get the clouds brighter and keep some detail in the building without blowing out the sign or turning the pole into a grey mass. (Lightroom does not have layers or masks.) Then I started fussing with the B&W conversion itself; blues and reds got darkened, purples were brightened. A quick count shows about 50 changes to this photo, most of them experimental and discarded. The one change I did keep was using the vignetting removal tool to add vignetting to the corners; I also turned off the luminance noise smoothing and increased the sharpening to bring out the noise.

The toning was also using LR; I kept the highlights neutral but added a blue (hue=238) to the shadows at 20% intensity.

Emboldened by what I learned with this photo, I was using the same basic idea of exposing for daylight and using selective fill flash when I was photographing some graffiti today. Ah, the irony of going on an outing with my camera club to an alleyway that's directly opposite the building where I've worked for almost four years.

[Keith Alan]

(Matthew, you already know what I think about this photo since I left identical comments at your blog and Flickr posts of it, so please forgive me for copy/pasting the same comment here?)

I like the way you did this, and the result is outstanding.
A great example of how using flash in the daytime combined with some underexposure can give you an original result, compared to just pointing and shooting in Program mode.
The de-emphasis of the building makes the sign pop, and the sky is terrific. Since the flash didn't reach the streetlamp and most of the wires, they are in silhouette--which is perfect against the clouds.
Lots of diagonal lines is always a plus, too.
You were really thinking, and it shows.


I'll add that I also like the post-processing very much.
It would have looked nice as a tweaked full-color shot, too.

[Irma]

I always like your wide-angle pictures Matt, this is also great.

Your post processing is splendid, and thanks for sharing your technique btw. Your composition is great, I like the way you worked with the diagonal lines.

I admired the use of flash in this one. I would love to learn more about using flash in my pictures out there, and not only in the studio. Looks very beautiful.

An excellent picture that inspires me...

[navis01]

Great picture Matt, has a real arty feel to it that makes you want to study it in detail. Amazing that you can make the mundane so interesting. Thanks for sharing the processing tips I would like to have a play with Lightroom sounds cool.

[matthew]

Thanks very much, everyone. And Keith, I was impressed that you'd spotted the technique that I had used, but I suppose I shouldn't be surprised considering how well you use flash. (I'm concerned that this just looks like some unsubtle photoshop dodging & burning.)

Here's another photo from last weekend, taken with the camera set to expose correctly for the sky and using selective fill flash. I'm starting to like this technique.


Watch for Pedestrians