Shards of Chrome | Weekly Photo #39
Who else uses presets when editing their photos? I’ve built up quite a collection over the years and included in these is a collection I call “City Chrome” which I use for many of my photos of London and can end up being a huge time saver. Granted, individual approaches will differ but I use presets as a kind of starting point, a base edit if you will. Then, once I get close to the look I’m after I will finish editing the image by making manual adjustments from there. If I create a new look that I like and want to recreate later, I will save those settings as a new preset in the collection.
Fujifilm X-T30 | XF35mm F2 | 35mm | 1/450th Second | f/2.8 | ISO160
This photo was taken during one of my recent shoots from the top of St Paul’s Cathedral. After climbing 528 stairs to get to the Golden Gallery, you are awarded some epic views of the city. I have shared two other photos taken from this location in previous Weekly Photo posts which you can read by following the links here:
As I circled the pinnacle of the dome, absorbing the epic views of London, the striking shape of The Shard caught my eye and away from the other high-rise buildings, it appears to stand alone, dwarfing the buildings that surrounded it. With these nice tones and textures in the clouds creating a great backdrop and The Shard positioned dead-centre in the frame, I went ahead and took the shot.
What I particularly like about these high-up, cityscape photos is the detail you can capture and the subtle areas of interest you can pick out as you look closer at the photo. Once I have studied the photo, taken in the entire scene and start to look closer, I get drawn to the details such as the tiny red buses crossing the river over on London Bridge or the smoke billowing out of the tall chimney over in the distance.
So back home, I used one of my City Chrome presets to kick off the editing process but in reality, the photo didn’t need much in the way of changing. With the preset applied, the photo was still a little underexposed so I lifted the exposure a touch and added some contrast. Next, I reduced the saturation a little, particularly the blue tones and finished off with a subtle vignette to pull more attention into the middle of the photo.
Until next week.
Trevor
This post is featured in my Weekly Photo series where I post a new photo every Monday. To have this delivered directly to your inbox, you can subscribe to the mailing list here.