The Bench in the Park

[golympio]

Here's an image made last weekend. This is a bench just in the park at the bottom of the building; nothing special about it. I happened upon it at a time when the sun was near to setting, and the backlight was beautiful, the mood was there so I ran to take the camera out of my trunk.

I used the 70-200 at 200mm, plus the extender 2x so that puts it at 400mm f5.6, sharpness be damned.
Picture taken as ISO 400 to reduce shaking, at about 1/400s. I dealt with the noise in Lightroom with curves by increasing the blacks, and with the very good noise reduction.
I found the best vantage point, lying on the floor behind the trees.

In case anyone is wondering this is a HDR, 3 shots bracketed and tonemapped in Photomatix.
Then I made several virtual copies in Lighroom, each adjusted to bring out:
- The green in the grass
- More red and orange in the sky
All combined into Photoshop, and then I made some final adjustments to the colors, added some brightness to the grass and darkened the trees.

That's it! 10 minutes total retouching

[zona5101]

That's a nice image!
Curious on creating different virtual copies then merging them...as opposed to making all the color adjustments on one. Are there some specific benefits of merging multiple virtual copies?

[golympio]

Sometimes I use adjustment layers in Photoshop, but the adjustments,especially color adjustments, are just easier and more "visual" to do in Lightroom.

I simply open them witht he "open as layers" command in Lightroom, and mask out the parts I want with the Wacom tablet. It saves me time!

[zona5101]

excellent. makes sense - thanks for the reply!

[Sebey]

Beautiful ... love it ....

[Glayva]

What a lovely image and many thanks for the write up and sharing. Very nice work

[renzdurano]

Great picture..it so refreshing in the eyes...

[windrider86]

Dont think I ever saw a park bench look so good!