It’s true about the old cars in Havana. What they don’t tell you is that most of them are held together with chewing gum and baling wire. They also don’t tell you about the creative colors they have been painted. I stood for half an hour on the street trying to get a good picture by panning the cars as they went by so the background would be blurred but the car would be in focus. I finally succeeded with this Chevy from the 1950s. Just added some vibrance and saturation in post and did a little cropping.
Back when I lived in Missoula, Montana I took some classes at the Rocky Mountain School of Photography. They had a sort of mantra “No, white skies!” In Ireland with it’s almost always cloudy skies this proved to be a challenge. In this image I had almost the holy grail of ancient site photography: A round tower, a celtic cross and the ruins of an old church all in one photo and the tower was framed in a window. Doesn’t get much better than that compositionally. But the sky in the upper corner was a very flat white. So, I turned to Topaz Texture Effects to help me out. I actually found several looks I liked but most were more monotone and I was grooving on the orange color of the lichens so I chose this one which gave me some color in the sky and a kind of crusty look which suited the old ruins well. And, of course, a nice purplely blue sky with texture
It was all about the post processing in this one as the shaded porch did not make for good light the the blue chair against the blue house didn’t work as well as I thought. I was considering a black and white treatment but after adding detail and saturation and adjusting the exposure using levels, I took it into Topaz texture effects where I found several looks that worked well. I ended up choosing the burning dust preset as it best fit my vision of how the chair should look.
A friend got permission for us to photograph in the boneyard of a logging company in the Applegate Valley. I’ve had a lot of fun processing each image for just the right look. I don’t really have a favorite, I chose this one because it is the last one I did. I took it into Nik Color Efex Pro to add detail and saturation. Then I turned around and took it into Topaz Texture Effects for an old timey look. I finally settled on the scratched bronze preset which gave me just the mood I was looking for.