Fire Department

[shutter_mom]

I am a member of the local firedepartment and decided to bring my camera with me to a meeting, never know when you can get a candid shot of the guys for the wall lol. Anyways, I decided to zoom in on the hosebed on one of the trucks. I have played around for a few hours trying to make the picture "pop" but just cant seem to get what I feel the picture should look like, possibly because the lighting in the bay didnt do it justice. I took this with my Nikon CoolpixL120. The editing program I use is Picasa3. Please any advice would be welcome. Also I do have other shots that turned out great and once I figure out how to link to an album I will be sure to post the link.

[shutter_mom]

Anyone? Could use some advice with this one please.

[RichardTaylor]

Lot's of shapes there .... Try a B&W conversion.
Or you can give it a slightly "industrial" grungy look.

With your permission I can post some examples.

[shutter_mom]

Anything sure, just want this picture to pop a bit more. The fire department has been a part of my life since I was born. Hoping to print this out and give it to my dad for his 60th bday this year. He was my inspiration and driving force to strike out on my own and prove that I coudl do it.

[IABoomer]

Is this the edited version, or the straight out of camera? If this is edited, could you post the SOOC? My initial impressions are the reds seem a bit too saturated to me, and I'd like to slightly rotate/crop the little line out of the bottom foreground.

[RichardTaylor]

Both very quick & dirty edits.

(1) A Topaz Adjust preset.



(2) A slightly modified Nik Silver Efex preset.

[shutter_mom]

OMG Robert, thats How I was imagining the picture to begin with. I'm just not familiar enough with Picas3 to figure out how to do that. Now that I know what its should look like I will keep working with it until I get that finish like you did. That was an orginal from the camera, the hose is jsut a very very bright red. Thnx again for the tutorial, I'll never forget it.

[RichardTaylor]

Your welcome.

[shutter_mom]

I left you a messege on Flickr as well Robert.

[IABoomer]

I felt like taking a stab at it.

Using Picasa, I went to the "advanced" tab and slid the white balance a bit to the left, which got rid of a bit of the harshness of the red. After that, I went to the "effects" tab and selected "saturation" and slid it a bit to the left to further tone down the reds and restore some detail. Finally, I went back to "advanced" and played with the shadows and highlights a little to add some contrast.

I didn't rotate/crop that line out of the front, but given the full-sized image, I would.

Here's what exists in my .picasa file for your image (not that it necessarily makes any sense, but you could probably edit the .picasa file on your computer where that image is stored and get those results).

filters=finetune2=1,0.000000,0.000000,0.000000,00000000,-0.567251;sat=1,-0.321637;finetune2=1,0.040936,0.098246,0.129123,00000000,0.000000;finetune2=1,0.000000,0.000000,0.000000,00000000,0.029240;