Saturday, November 15, 2008

New Zealand... Day 1

So I've finally gotten around to processing my NZ photos... starting with the crappiest set of NZ photos - day in Auckland. As nice of a city as Auckland is, it's just not very photogenic, at least I didn't find it very interesting. We got to Auckland in the morning after a long flight from HK/TPE. Our flight to Hong Kong was delayed by about 1 hour + another 1.5 hours of circling in the air due to typhoon passing through which meant that we completely missed our connecting flight to Auckland. We basically spent the better part of the day at Hong Kong airport. Not a great start to our trip, but at least we got to see everything we were suppose to and it all worked out in the end. Anyways, some photos from Auckland (album: http://picasaweb.google.com/pingc315/NZTripDay1Auckland#):

From NZ Trip Day 1 - Auckland

This was taken at the Mt. Eden volcano crater. Mt. Eden is the highest point in Auckland (natural one at least) which offers great view of the city. The crater was huge so I decided to swap over to using my 10-22 super wide lens. While I'm not thrilled about the tourist walking, I like having the path there to kind of make it more interesting (I do have a version without the path and tourists).

From NZ Trip Day 1 - Auckland




After Mt. Eden, we stopped by Auckland war memorial museum and the botanical garden next to it. These 2 photos were really bland originally, no colors in the sky (cloudy) and just lacked anything interesting (no colors to really jump out at you, etc). I decided to desaturated it a bit, made the over all photo warmer/reddish to give it the old sepia feel (but not actually sepia). I rather like the result, much more than the original anyways (another example of how lightroom saved my photo). Hope you like it too.

2 comments:

  1. amazing pics man. i dont know how you do it. ive linked like 3 ppl to your blog today, haha. did you hdr the 1st pic? it looks so unreal (that's not an insult).

    im curious how you post-processed these. you have liek 10x the talent i have, heh. chk out http://chrisandsheley.blogspot.com though

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  2. Hey there. No, the first pic was just plain regular shot. I think at most I did was a graduated tint thing in Lightroom 2.
    And dont' say that, haha I just started using LR 2 to post process these photos, so I'm just learning, like everyone else. Learn and experiment. For post processing the typical thing I do is to shift the hues (orange to yellow, yellow to green) and darken the blue so the sky gets darker. Bump up the saturation and clarity in Lightroom to sharpen it and get a bit more color... that's about it. Just make sure the highlights are bright enough so the clouds look white without being blown out.

    I just uploaded day 2 of the trip so expect more coming in the next few days. BTW you got some great pics too. I love the street photography, you've really captured the environment well I think

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