Couple of old abandoned sheds

Wozza · Jun 10, 2014

Couple of early morning photo's taken in the last couple of weeks. Nothing like standing in a freezing cold paddock (field) waiting for some light.

Whitemans Valley by Wozza_NZ, on Flickr

Carterton Shed by Wozza_NZ, on Flickr

mrs.hankIII · Jun 10, 2014

Beautiful. I really, really like that last one!

JLaurenPhoto · Jun 10, 2014

I really in love with the last photo. It is so beautiful. How did you do that shot?

Wozza · Jun 11, 2014

mrs.hankIII said:
Beautiful. I really, really like that last one!

Hey thanks

JLaurenPhoto said:
I really in love with the last photo. It is so beautiful. How did you do that shot?

This is a shed I had driven past a few times before, and it always stood out from the road. I had taken a pic once before on a nice day driving past.

Overgrown by Wozza_NZ, on Flickr

Maize by Wozza_NZ, on Flickr

This time though, I wanted to go here to take photo's as opposed to being on the way to somewhere else. I got there at about 6:40am in the blue hour and took some long exposures waiting for the sun to come out.

Unfortunately there was a heap of low cloud that the sun couldn't quite get through, so I was getting really flat images. Pacing back to the car (to make sure my Mountainbike was stillon the back of it) and taking off my gloves every now and again for some Candy Crush on the i-pod, I managed to stay close to the camera and and eye on the sun. It was probably about 8:20 when the sun shone through a strip between two clouds and lit up some of the scene dramatically. The light was gone in another 20 seconds or so, but I had fired the shutter multiple times by this point.

Of course there was a lot of contrast going on, and I don't carry any filters at the moment, so I had to do two exposures to stop the clouds from blowing out. Once I got home I put the two images on top of each other in photoshop elements and manually blended the images with a very transparent large eraser brush. I usually work with one exposure, but here I really needed two. I worked pretty slowly and made the brush very transparent to eliminate any hard edges, peeling the image back bit by bit. I don't like over-edited photo's so the idea was to try and keep it true to the light I had seen with my own eyes.

Once I had done this, I merged the two layers and started my normal workflow. I created a duplicate layer, on which I did a colour and curve adjustment. I also did some dodging and burning on the light and shadow side of the shed as well as recovering some detail in the foreground. I don;t worry about going a little bit overboard here as my next step is to adjust the transparency of this layer and merge it back over the original layer to keep the image looking natural and true to the original.

In terms of gear, I used a 7d, a tripod and cabled shutter release, and my ever trusty Sigma 20mm F1.8mm lens that I absolutely love, even if I semi broke the auto/manual switch a couple of years back which causes it to have a hissy every now and then.