Another photo from London edited whilst listening to the wind and rain pounding off the studio window here on Vancouver Island.
5 mins before this photo was taken the sun was out and people were eating lunch outside in street side cafes. A crack of thunder later and there were about 20 of us huddled for shelter under the canopy of an office building. I dashed out into the downpour to capture this shot. 5 mins later, the rain passed, the sun came out and everyone returned to the patios.
I was going back through some of this years photographs looking for a replacement for one of the black and white portrait images hanging on the wall and got distracted by this photo taken in the London underground.
The original photo was taken with a wide angle and slow shutter speed. By standing on one escalator and holding the camera steady, I was able to get it relatively sharp whilst introducing the movement in the other escalator along with the commuters coming towards me. The closer the subject to the lens, the more accentuated the motion blur giving a progressive strength from the almost unrecognisable figures on the left to the more detailed commuters near the top. Using a wide angle lens and looking up distorts and increases the perspective leading to the acute angles in the image.
I always shoot in RAW format (i.e. no in camera processing, just the raw data captured straight from the sensor), as this gives the greatest latitude for controlling the post processing. The original RAW image is generally flat and has a green yellow colour cast caused by the underground light.
ORIGINAL RAW FILE.
Most RAW files exhibit this apparent lack of contrast and sharpness and so the photo is often overlooked as not worth saving. However with a small amount of post processing a better and more realistic representation can be gleaned.
I normally start in Lightroom applying basic exposure, colour temperature and clarity adjustments on the global image. Normally this is often enough and the post processing stops there. However when I took this image, the escalator was busy and a disembodied arm was left at the edge of the frame. Removing this takes a bit more care and for that I used Photoshop to clone another section of the escalator, resize, fix perspective and blend over the arm.
The final process was to take the image into Nik Color FX pro, to correct some remaining colour cast and boost the contrast before returning the image to Lightroom for cataloging and export.
THE FINAL IMAGE AFTER POST PROCESSING.