Miami aerial

Miami, Brickell
CLICK FOR SLIDESHOW

I tagged along with a friend who was apartment hunting in Midtown, Edgewater, and Brickell this weekend, and I’ve got photos. You’ll see some weird effects of the building boom here, including construction cranes of projects still underway.

Like an abject rookie, I left my camera with all the crappy camera settings from a previous shoot. These photos were saved somewhat in Photoshop, but they have an odd quality, like snapshots from the ’80s found in a shoebox. Which may be appropriate in a way. I’ve got a song for you to listen to while looking at these (opens in a new window) at my Tumblr, if you like yours with a little multimedia.

6 thoughts on “Miami aerial

  1. Cool shots. What settings did you have your camera on? I couldn’t tell you had it on the wrong settings.

    Although the lyrics may have pertained to the slideshow, I didn’t think the music connected to the photos. A little too countryish.

  2. It’s like CM, only not as good.

    Countryish?! Ayayay. The song is about flying in an airplane, looking down at towns and cities, and thinking about how supply lines and everything works. I always think about that song when I’m up high looking down at things. It’s from More Songs about Buildings and Food, btw.

    Compare them to these photos, and you’ll see a huge difference in quality. I had ISO on 1600 (the Rebel’s max). But more importantly, I usually use a custom high-saturation low-contrast setting. For my other photo shoot, I just changed the camera back to Standard picture mode, which for pictures with this much contrast made for some real ugly shadows. (The 8th picture in the series, the first one I actually shot, was also in Incandescent mode.)

    I fixed them somewhat in photoshop. For most of them, I did a levels adjustment. Sometimes I tweak the blue and red channels in levels to do a coarse color balance too. Then I dodged the really dark areas by doing another levels adjustment, backing up in the history palette, and painting in the “future” state with the history brush. Sometimes also a graduated density effect with another levels adjustment on a gradient. A little sharpening and they’re out the door.

  3. Damn, you’re much more proficient in PS than I am.

    I shoot in RAW so I do my initial editing there, but once I switch over to PS, I basically stick to levels, curves, shadows/highlights and smart sharpen.

    I sometimes use photo filters and if I shoot in a high ISO like 1600 or 3200, I use the Neat Image plug-in to reduce the digital noise.

    Sometimes I get a little fancier but there are many functions on PS that I am clueless about.

    This is why I’ve been considering switching to Lightroom even though I’ve never used it.

  4. The history brush… I can say it changed my life. You don’t know how many photos I have rescued by adjusting levels or saturation, then painting over from a previous stage. Works great for shadows on the face, for example.

  5. Alex~ Yeah, history brush is fun. I use it more often the other way, though, painting in stuff from the “future.” Crank your saturation, back up a step, set the history brush to 50% opacity, and have fun.

    Carlos~ Photoshop is a bottomless pit of what is possible, because it’s not so much about the program’s features, it’s the open-ended way the features interact with each other. That said, lightroom is a beautiful piece of software, and makes lots and lots of sense for a photographer.

Comments are closed.