Every now and then I spend some time going through my image library, which goes right back to my first digital photographs, and take 10 minutes post-processing a photograph that I might have previously dismissed, using some tricks I’ve picked up along the way to make older photos maybe not better, but perhaps more interesting. Indeed sometimes I can find some hidden gems doing this.
I did just that last night with this shot of Sydney Opera House. When you photograph something as iconic as the Opera House, particularly when it is already one of the most photographed buildings in the world, its a challenge to come up with something a little bit different. That’s what I was trying to do with this photograph. I have a few others which are even more abstract – perhaps too much so – but when I tweaked this in Aperture last night I came up with this image which I think has some potential.
The photograph was taken with a Fuji Finepix s5000 which was my second ever digital camera (and my first one that was in any way decent). One of its best features was its 10x optical zoom, although this shot was taken with the lens at its widest setting of 12mm.
The original photograph was a wider crop than this, and is shot through glass which was quite dirty, and there was a severe lack of contrast. I could do alot with it in Aperture, but it began to get very noisy in the darker areas. To counter that I burned out large areas at the top of the frame, and, as I often do with noisy images, converted it to black and white.
Sydney is one of those places I’d love to go back to armed with my D300 and a bag full of lenses. I suspect I’d need lots and lots of memory cards too! Maybe some day.
You would also need a very patient wife!