Having watched PhotoJosephâs webinar on PL5âs new features, once again I sort of thought I understood, but the way Joanna describes things, I not only know âwhatâ the tool does, but how to use it effectively. Big difference.
Last night some huge yachts anchored and docked just outside my condo, and I took a ânight shotâ with my iPhone. I decided to wake up early and capture the scene at sunrise. I woke up late, grabbed the Nikon 750, set it to 24mm to get in the whole scene (which I couldnât do with the iPhone), rested the camera on the balcony railing, and took several shots as everything was getting lighter by the second. I didnât have time to set up the tripod, which was right there, and I guessed at the exposure, as I was too sleepy to know what I was doing. Excuses. At any rate, five shots captured what I saw, and one of them gave me enough âroomâ to correct the parallax errors from a wide angle lens aimed downwards.
So many things Joanna forced into my brain all came together, like using the â8-pointsâ correction, then forcibly rotating the image CCW after seeing the (G)rid view showed me it was still tilted. Then it was off to adjust for exposure, so nothing was blown out, and then I fiddled with the color controls so the image looked ânormalâ to me, and not all blueish. When everything was done, I tried to improve the sky, which was too âboringâ. I did use the new âLine Controlâ tool, and I think (hope) I did it correctly. (Having second thoughts, maybe I should have just left it all blueish, or maybe that was because the 750 was still set for 5600K ? I just adjusted the color to look good to me, on my screen, but it is now more âwhat I feltâ than âwhat I sawâ.)
I got done just in time - the yacht with the underwater lighting sailed off, and the lighting quickly turned into full daylight, meaning all the lights on the ships and things in the background were turned off. This is something else Iâm not sure of - I edited the image so it is âlitâ nicely, but maybe itâs now âtoo brightâ?
Hereâs the image data:
_MJM9367 | 2021-10-30.nef (26.2 MB)
_MJM9367 | 2021-10-30.nef.dop (14.8 KB)
My original question was how to use Control Line more effectively, but Iâm usually pleased to see how other people âseeâ my images. As a photojournalist, Iâve already broken all the rules, so this image is more âartâ than âphotojournalismâ. And all the âstuffâ at the lower left was left in to compensate for all the âstuffâ at the top right, so the photo feels âbalancedâ to meâŠ