Weekly Photo Challenge: Sky
©Rena Katinas
So, I’m a little behind on my Photo Challenges. With the subject being sky, I shouldn’t be, as I’m a big fan of cloud watching and star gazing. Anyhoo, I shot this the day after the Great Storm of June 2011, from my back porch.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Refreshing
©Rena Katinas
You’re thinking, lightning is not refreshing. On a hot Chicago summer night, like tonight, it was very refreshing indeed. Too bad it all started before I could find my tripod, holding the camera still for a 30 second exposure is impossible. In the end I decided better tired arms and blurry treetops than no shot! Also that strange cloud on the lower right, is a funnel cloud!
Decided to throw a couple more in, after I realized I had captured a funnel cloud in my shots, sorry for the blurriness!
©Rena Katinas
©Rena Katinas
©Rena Katinas
Weekly Photo Challenge: Worn
©Rena Katinas
I’m glad there is no shortage of “worn” in my neighborhood! Pictured above is a small portion of my neighbor’s garage door. Unfortunately I shot this about a half an hour before sunset, which would’ve been great if it were facing west (it faces east.) The next sunny morning that comes along, I’ll be back.
Dealing With Multiple White Balance Settings in Lightroom and Photoshop
German Baptist Deaconess Home and Hospital Society (formerly) ©Rena Katinas
I walk past what was once the Baptist Girls Home pictured above, most evenings. The stair entrance is painted mint green and the combination of it with fluorescent light gives it this sickly green glow that I wanted to document with a photograph in case someone had a sudden case of good sense and changed the color/lighting combination.
Once I brought the image into Lightroom 3 for development, I realized I had two different light sources in the shot and each had a different white balance setting. You can see in the set of photos below, that neither white balance in the left and middle image works on a whole. Even though I like the green in the Tungsten (left) version, it’s not a true color representation of the subject. The fluorescent version (middle) is right on the money as far as the stairwell and wood door are concerned, but it throws the color of everything else completely out of wack. Normally I would go to the Hue/Saturation/Luminance panel in Lightroom, to deal with off color, but I wanted to work on the wood door without affecting the brick’s color. A HSL panel within the Adjustment Brush would be a really nice thing right about now! There isn’t one, so the next best thing is Layer Masks in Photoshop.
White Balance from left to right: tungsten, fluorescent, and tungsten/fluorescent combined
I put the Tungsten version on the topmost layer, including a layer mask and the Fluorescent version below. After I removed most of the door and stairwell in the layer mask, I realized that I had forgotten the third light source, the street light behind me and the bottom step which had a mix of all three light sources. Using a brush set at 10% opacity, I was able to decide the light source percentages for each plane of the lower half of the steps and the sidewalk, by selectively painting back into, or removing from the mask layer of the channels palette.
Mask in channels palette
Once I put the almost final image in this post, I noticed three blue shadows, that must have something to do with the change in color space from Photoshop to the browser window, so I’ll have to figure out what’s going on there. Bottom line, it would be nice if there were a way to have multiple white balances along with Hue/Saturation/Luminosity, using the Adjustment Brush in Lightroom, but thank goodness for my old friend, Photoshop’s layer mask feature until then!
Weekly Photo Challenge: Water
©Rena Katinas
I really wasn’t sure what I was going to do for this week’s Photo Challenge. Our city rests on an inland sea, a beautiful one, but a picture of Lake Michigan as a whole is just a bit too literal for me. I considered doing some sort of something or other with glasses of water, but my family seems to be hoarding all the water glasses in their bedroom. I thought I was going to have to opt out of this week’s challenge. Wouldn’t you know it, today turned out to be one of those wonderful rainy spring days, the kind that turn the sky so dark, you have to turn the lights on at noon. Really dark stormy days are so rare, and I love them. Pictured above is a close-up of water droplets on my window screen, or Lake Michigan in very tiny bits.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Tiny
©Rena Katinas
This week I have not one but two photos, taken at 18th and Wentworth, down by the railroad tracks. These thistles or weeds are on their own, there isn’t much nature to be found in the immediate area. The second image is just me having a little fun in Photoshop!
©Rena Katinas
Weekly Photo Challenge: Wildlife
©Rena Katinas
Wildlife in Chicago isn’t abundant, mostly rats and stray cats in my neighborhood. I found this guy or gal chilling at the boat yards along the Chicago River, on the south side. It’s some kind of insect, I know that much. Maybe it’s a cicada, or a grasshopper, not sure how to tag this… “mystery bug”? If there are any bug-people out there, (bug enthusiasts or people who believe they have been genetically altered with bug DNA – I’m not picky) if you know what this is, let me know!
Rena's Not Dead Yet 