Photo of the Day, Boston Style: Part VI (2013)

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From Sunday. Really good lighting that morning. Pics are unaltered... I tired of that experiment.

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Wow! Atlantic Wharf looks fantastic at that angle. Great shots!
 
Yup. It's just a leftover shot from a year ago that I decided to dust off and share. Speaking of which---

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DZH22 said:
From Sunday. Really good lighting that morning. Pics are unaltered... I tired of that experiment.
Click to expand...

Don't give up so soon! Your early experiments may not always be to your liking (I look back on my early editing days of '05 and shake my head) but it'll only help you to figure out what's good, what's bad and what it is you want your pictures to be. I just got a powerful new program (Adobe Lightroom) and the last week's worth of posts in this thread have been me trying to find my voice within its millions of options.....for instance:

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That's an "infrared" black and white option that I just tried out on the below shot, which has a bit of editing:

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Then I went for an Instagram-ish filter:

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Different strokes for different folks, and I'm not sure which path I prefer at this point. But the point is it can't hurt to try.
 
^^^ Thanks for the words of inspiration. I think the biggest issue is just that it's so time consuming, and some of them I would work on for 20-30 minutes and not at all get what I wanted. I definitely take too many pics already to put each one through the ringer like that...

However, it's possible that I might end up working in Raleigh for a couple years before I come back for good, so then I'll have a bit of time to go back to my old/current Boston pics and mess around some more.
 
30 minutes on one shot is too much, but the more you try now the sooner you'll get a workflow down and you'll figure out which controls serve your purpose and which ones are best left ignored. What program are you using?
 
Since I was just getting started into it, I was using this: http://pixlr.com/express/
and mainly adjusted for: contrast, brightness, sharpen, saturation, vibrance, lightness, and a little bit on hue. Haven't really done it in about a month.
 
Huh.....never heard of it but I just spent a few minutes in it trying to edit a shot, and my thoughts are it's very limited on the basic editing controls (brightness, saturation, contrast, etc.) but had a lot of good filters to toy with. I'd suggest downloading Google Picasa because 1) it's free and 2) its controls are more in depth and set up like what you'd see in a proper editor. And having a histogram to look at really helps you understand the mechanics behind each and every adjustment you're making.

This isn't a Picasa screenshot but it's similar enough to show how having an interface like this can both streamline your workflow and more intuitively teach you what to do:

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My new program is a lot like that, except about ten times more elaborate. (and yes it's become a royal time sink as I figure it all out)
 
Nice looking shots, KZ! I've been using Lightroom 4 for a few months now and am having fun with it. I usually shoot in Raw format and it is great for getting exposure and white balance just right. It's very much worth the price to me (it's occasionally on sale for around $~50).

I agree that spending 30 minutes on a single shot is way too much, unless you are selling the photo. My main problem is that I take too many photos, even with a daily photo blog and all the other sites that I share them on, and I end up with a hard drive full of unedited photos that I can't part with!
 
Thanks, Corey. Your shots have been looking great for quite some time now, but nice to know someone else here is using Lightroom 4. And up to this point I'd been shooting in jpeg but it makes sense to switch to Raw....I really want to start experimenting with the tone mapping stuff!

And same problem here with taking too many shots. I just edit the ones that I plan on putting up on the interweb; the others...they'll probably never see a single edit.
 
That first shot of the dome is fantastic...nice shots!
 
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