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Behind the Image
Behind the Image: Skyline Reflection
Dave Soderlund
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Subject Inspiration:
I was in Boston in the summer of 2015 for an American Chemical Society meeting. Carol found that there was a huge outdoor fiber art installation at the Boston Greenway -- a large web of colored ropes, suspended from buildings and floating over the open park. While she was viewing and trying to photograph the art installation, my eye was caught by the distorted reflection of the Boston skyline in the glass facade of the Intercontinental Hotel. I decided to take an iPhone shot just for fun (Fig. 1). The iPhone image showed me the potential to create an architectural abstract if I could figure out a good composition and deal with perspective distortion.
Shooting:
I was traveling light that day, with just my D750 and 24-120 f/4 lens in a small shoulder bag. A wide shot at 27mm was, like the iPhone shot, greatly distorted and included a lot of material I didn’t want in my envisioned image. I also tried to isolate individual reflections at focal lengths of 60-120mm, but I was not pleased with what I saw on the back of the camera. Finally, I took four overlapping vertical images for use in assembling a panorama.
Processing:
As I viewed and processed this series in Lightroom, I realized that the wide angle image (Fig. 2) had the greatest potential to produce what I envisioned. However, to get what I wanted I needed to first address the perspective distortion and then crop the image to a desired composition. I used the transform tool to establish true horizontal and vertical lines. I then cropped the image to focus on the three bright areas and eliminate both the area of sky above the building and the street-level clutter at the bottom. These adjustments are shown in a Lightroom screenshot (Fig. 3).
The development of the final image (Fig. 4) in Lightroom was pretty conventional. I adjusted Exposure, Black and White points, and Highlights and Shadows. I increased Vibrance and Saturation, and added a touch of Clarity. Fig. 4. Skyline Reflection.
