Monday, September 26, 2022

M/V Ohio Valley: One photo, several versions

River photography would be simpler if I were to just take a picture and post it online. But I can't. If it's around solar noon on a cloudless day, I need to adjust some settings so the contrast between light and shadow is more lifelike. Then I see how it looks if I make a few editing changes. Such was what happened when I started working on photos of the Marathon Petroleum towboat Ohio Valley yesterday.

When the guy steering the boat started doing a 360, I set my camera on continuous shooting so I was more likely to get the boat straight on from front and rear. And I had to get the perfect three-quarters angles from front and rear. All in all, in a few minute I shot more than 200 images. Tonight I pared that down to about 16 to 18, depending on how you count them. If I take 10 minutes to look at each image to ensure I get it right, that's a lot of editing time.

So here is one image, front three-quarters from the port side.

First, the basic image after I made slight adjustments to the bright parts and the shadows, and then took the resolution down so I could upload it to Blogger.



Lately I've been in a black-and-white mood, so here's how it would look that way.



And I had to zoom in on the front of the boat because a guy was standing outside the pilothouse door. In this one, if you zoom in you won't be able to see much, but the original has more detail.



So anywhat, that's how I do things. I probably won't spend so much time on each image these next few days as I work on them, but it's the process I go through.

And now that I've uploaded these, there are a couple of other adjustments going through my head. Not tonight, though.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments.