Under the Weather

Here's one of my New York photos that turned out pretty good, and I wasn't really expecting it to. I took this shot while standing on the Staten Island Ferry as I was returning to Manhattan. It was kind of a cold drizzly day with low cloud cover and a bit of fog. Luckily it wasn't too dark out because I was shooting handheld on a moving boat zoomed in at 200mm, but I managed to squeak out a shutter speed of 1/200 seconds with a decent aperture. I composed the shot vertically so that the low clouds and the water would occupy about the same amount of space within the frame. I did my horizontal composition to offset the boat just slightly from the center, giving it extra room in the direction is was heading. This all took several tries since I was wobbling around on a boat.

I didn't do a whole lot of editing on this one because it started yielding good results after just a few adjustments. I did my basic exposure and color editing using ACR — and you can see the difference it makes in the photo above. The first image is the JPEG that came out of the camera, and the second color image is after the RAW file came out of ACR. Even after I did this adjustment, I wasn't happy with the color image because it just didn't seem to do it for this photo. I converted to black and white using Photoshop's Channel Mixer with -70% red, 106% green, and 72% blue. I pretty much liked the photo just the way it was, but I did an additional two layer blends with duplicate images. One was a color burn blend at 8% opacity and the other was a soft light blend at 12% opacity. These gave the photo just a slight amount of extra depth by brightening the highlights and darkening the shadows. Then I sharpened a small amount using the unsharp mask. But really, most of the work was done just with the ACR conversion and the channel mixer.

** You can also see this photo on Flickr **

Photo by Brian Auer
06/26/06 New York, NY
Under the Weather
Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D
Konica Minolta AF DT 18-200
300mm equiv * f/8 * 1/200s * ISO100