Saint Patrick's - Poster

Trying something new now – rather than just posting photos to my pro site for printing and framing, I thought, why not try shooting them to be printed as posters? So, I have a few examples out there now and want to see if it catches on at all. I am not looking to get rich with this latest scheme – just hoping to cover the cost of the SmugMug website that is hosting the images.

Feedback

So far, I have had a lot of positive feed back on this photo on both my Flickr account and my raylarose.com account.  (The only version for sale is on the raylarose.com site – the one on Flickr is for just looking at!)  But if you can leave feedback here or there, I’d really appreciate it.

To check it out, I am thinking of printing this as a 30″ poster and framing it to replace my  Ansel Adams shot of the Snake River and Grand Teton’s over my fireplace.

Yeah, good for the ego!  Also will server as my reminder to why I want the D700 or 700s.  If the phantom thing ever hits the street.

Finding the Target

My first step,though, is getting the word out that this shot can be purchased.  Not only out, but out to the right people.  I need to find my target – those with ties to New York City and the Cathedral there.  Not sure how I want to tackle that yet, but is something I need to figure out.  Anything you can give in way of advise is greatly appreciated.

Getting the Shot

I covered this in a previous post.  This is that same photo, brought into Black and White and some contrast adjusted to bring out the lights and darks just right.  Really, just played with the curves until it was damned sexy.  Then I reset the canvas and added a little text to the bottom.  That was all!

Well, gotta go look at my bank account and cry now… no closer to my 700!

St Patrick's Cathedral - New York City

Had a wonderful 3-day weekend in New York City with my best friend and fellow photo-nut, Dori.  Lucky for me, she lives just off Central Park on Broadway.  We spent the weekend walk, talking, drinking and shooting.  Not necessarily in that order.

I was really hoping to have my D700 for this trip, but I still do not have the money – so I made the best of it with my D80.

One of our photowalks was to St Patrick’s Cathedral.  It was a hike-and-a-half from her place on Broadway, but so worth it.  Especially after walking through an exceptionally snowy Central Park.

Anyhow, at St Patrick’s, I knew I wanted to do some fisheye and some 10mm shots with my Sigma.  Posted here is an example of my 10mm Sigma shot. It was simply amazing in here.  I took over 100 photos of the walls and ceiling and am slowly going through them to clean em up.

I really expected to do all these in HDR as well, but know what, I am not.  The HDR on these looks way to fake.  The details you see here are a combination of white-balance and contrasting.  I’ll tell you how.

Tonal Contrasting

Tonal contrast is what some call “pseudo-HDR” – but it is really about brining out the details of a single RAW image.  No blending, no multiple exposures.  Just a single image.

To do this, I first off-loaded my RAW file in Lightroom.  There was no need for adjusting the crop – this is where it sat – propped up against Dori’s Canon.  (As one friend on Flickr said, now we know what Canon’s are good for!)  Anyhow, in Lightroom, I set the white-balance to daylight to give the room a golden glow.  Then sent it off to Photoshop for the touches.

Color Efex 3 Settings

In Photoshop, I opened up NIK Software’s Color Efex Pro 3 to contrast the lights and darks. You can see the settings I used just to the right. It was very subtle.  I did not touch the Highlights, nudged the Shadows and gave the most contrast to the Midtones.  But as you can see, just barely.

After that, I did a line & curve adjustment for balance and added a highpass filter to make up for the limited sharpness of my D80.  Again, it was a very minimal pass.

That was it.

The above image is the result of slightly less than one minute of processing from camera to export.  And without any HDR.

I do really like the look and feel of tonemapping over HDR in many instances.  Especially in architecture.  But for things like nature, I prefer the use of HDR to bring out the light as seen by the naked eye.

I have a ton more shots to see on my pro page (Raymond Larose Photography) and will be posting a new image daily on my fun page (Flickr).