Steven Bourelle Digital Arts

Here’s the first real fall colors of the season in Kenosha WI. This image was shot on Monday at Petrifying Springs County Park.

It’s interesting to note that this group of  trees was the first to change last year too. I took pictures of them on October 8 last year. They seem to be a little farther along this year though. In my images from 2008 they aren’t quite as orange as in this picture.

I’d say that the Kenosha area is about 25-50% changing now. It still has a ways to go, but the forecast is calling for temperatures in the 40′s next week with the possibility of our first freeze. That should really get the trees going and keep me very busy photographing them.

You can see the rest of Monday’s pictures on My Flickr Photostream.

No Comments »

This image was shot at Hyde’s Mill in South-west Wisconsin. What a cool little place.

We drove 150 miles, one way, just to see this beautiful little mill. It was worth every mile. When we got there it was very cloudy, perfect conditions for shooting the mill. The sun came out a little later and the scene became way to contrasty. Along with the mill there is an old blacksmith building, a bunch of grinding stones and three old rusty turbines.

In processing this image I did something I’ve never done before. I used Lightroom’s develop presets. Normally when I work on a black and white, or in this case sepia image, I do all the work in Photoshop and use a combination of Nik Software’s Silver Efexs Pro and adjustment layers. I wanted to do a black and white image of this scene and for some reason I started clicking on the presets. When I clicked on the sepia one I liked what I saw, then I clicked on a couple more and things really got interesting. I played around with the contrast, added a vignette and then exported the image.

Then I opened it up in Photoshop and continued to play around with it. I used Nik Software’s Color Efex Pro to add a little more vignette and to reposition it a little. I also did some burn work here and there and did some more contrast work with adjustment layers.

Before we left on this trip, I had a vision in my mind of the image I wanted from the mill. This image is pretty close to what I saw in my mind. It’s almost as if my subconscious knew what I wanted and clicked on the right Lightroom presets to give it to me.

2 Comments »

Here lately, while I’m waiting for the fall colors to really get going in Wisconsin, I’ve been going through some of my old images from the Eastern Sierra. Mostly images from the fall of 2005. I shot a lot of photos in Sept. and Oct. of ’05 and I remember being disappointed in many of them at that time. Looking at them now, four years later, I’m finding that I really like many of these images.

What I’m seeing are images that were composed nicely, but have some exposure and color issues. I’m sure at the time I was disappointed in these images because of that. I knew Photoshop very well in 2005, but I wasn’t nearly as knowledgeable as I am today. Now I can fix exposure and colors issues without even thinking to much about it. Another big difference between now and ’05 is Adobe Lightroom. It wasn’t even out back then. I think it came out in 2006 if I’m not mistaken. Lightroom has now become my main tool in post processing. It gives me the ability to fix the white balance and exposure  issues that many of these images have just by moving a couple sliders.

This image of an Eastern Sierra aspen grove is a perfect example. The white balance was very blue on it and it was slightly underexposed. I shot this image as a JPG, not a RAW, but I was still able to fix the white balance and exposure in Lightroom. Just by adding yellow and magenta I warmed the picture up and with some contrast made it look as I first envisioned it.

It’s pretty awesome to go back through my files and find these types of hidden treasures. I’m finding that as I become more knowledgeable with Lightroom and Photoshop, I can save images that I thought were lost.  Sometimes I turn them into black and whites, and sometimes I’m able to make them look as I wanted them to look when I first shot them.

No Comments »