53 Week Photography Projects Week 7: On the shelf

Week 7! Straightforward enough. My picture comes from my collection from my family trip around Hokkaido in 2010. It was a display at a souvenir shop. Shot with my previous tele lens, the Canon EF 70-200 f2.8L, since replaced by the IS mk II. :)

53 Week Photography Projects Week 6: Neighbors

Week 6's theme was a stumper as to be perfectly honest, my neighbors just aren't that interesting. Well except for that big Malamute across the street. Anyway, I figure Singapore is my neighbor (of Indonesia) so that's that! :D

53 Week Photography Projects Week 5: Colors

Week 5's entry is 'Colors' so I decided to use one of my first Singapore walkaround photos. Bokeh balls!

A walk around Singapore (9-13 Oct '11)

Made another trip to Singapore and managed to see some sights I couldn't the last time. This time I only brought a Canon 50mm F1.2L (on long term loan) and Sigma AF 8-16mm F4.5-5.6 DC HSM. I have to say the Canon 50mm is a superb lens. While it isn't the fastest in focusing, the results from f1.2 is simply brilliant. It sucks in more light than a blackhole! Everything in the background also basically melts into a gooey blurry liquid. Bokehlicious!

I also brought my Joby Gorillapod Zoom but was quite disappointed with the performance. Anchored to a rail, it was barely able to handle my Canon 60D + Canon 50mm F1.2, even though it's rated for 5kg. Meh.

Anyway, I really liked how some of these photos turned out. With the help of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, I am able to clean up the noise and sharpen the images quite easily. It also helps in 'popping' the colors. It is now an indispensable tool for me.

Full set of pictures on Flickr

I've yet to find the guts to shoot much of people from in front of them so most of the pictures here are from the back. And some of the composition is still off, but I think I've made a bit of improvement which is always nice.

Playing with Lightroom

For a long while now, I've been using Adobe Bridge and Adobe Photoshop as my photo management and photo editing system respectively. Bridge isn't perfect, but it has a very short learning curve and it has a superb KISS approach. I've been using Photoshop since version 3; I'm by no means an advanced user, but I'm very comfortable with how I use it.

Spending way to much time on the Internet however, I've learned that many photographers use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for managing and editing their photos instead. After playing around with it for about 2 days, I now understand why Lightroom (along with Apple's Aperture) is THE application for the photographer. It basically allows you to do 99% of what you need with a photo: manage, edit, beautify, crop, add filters, fix errors, reduce noise. All of them can be done in Lightroom.

This photo was part of my walkaround set from Singapore in September. I couldn't edit it properly in Photoshop then so I never did post process it.

With Lightroom, I cropped, converted to black & white with a preset, adjusted contrast and luminescence, added a vignette and even added a watermark. And it took less than 10 minutes to do it.

It won't be printable considering how much I cropped it, but it looks decent for the web :). And with that, I'm sold on Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.