not the moon

A banana inside the room with direct sunlight, taken with the TZ3, with spot metering and an exposure compensation of -2 stops. My wife was holding it from the tip, I cloned her hand out of the crop on Photoshop, and adjusted the levels to get that slice effect. I know it would belong better in last week’s shadow assignment, but I think the confusion it creates at first sight for being in black and white and not yellow justifies its presence in this week’s assignment. It’s an extreme shot in terms of black levels, it might not look the same on every computer’s monitor.

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textures of Lisbon

A balcony across the street from my hospital room, a clear example of what Lisbon is: beautiful, old, and not always kept at its best, but always with a little charm. The lack of color brings the textures of age and lack of upkeep to the foreground of attention. Also shot with the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ3.

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lonely

A bird perched on the roof of a building across the street, looking away from us. This is the first, and up to now, the only shot taken with my new Canon EOS 5D that I’m using here at the site, using Nuno’s Tamron 28-300mm that I sold him. The photo came out naturally almost without any colour, as it was taken with an overall metering that made the foreground pretty dark. I later pulled up a lot of detail from the almost black walls and roof, which is one of the advantages of the 5D’s greater dynamic range.

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press F1

This is the view of the button hanging over me that I press to alert the hospital staff that I need help with something, thus the name of the picture, as on a lot of computer systems the F1 key is the shortcut to the help system. I like the slightly retro design of the button, with clean but dated lines, and using the TZ3’s macro mode, I was able to get a pretty shallow depth of field. The transition to black and white enhances the clean lines and depth of the picture - the cable has an ugly faded yellow color which would draw the attention away from the button itself.

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no parking here!

A traffic cone on the parking lot I see from the room’s balcony, on the ambulance’s parking space - so no cars park there. I cheated slightly on this one - I used Photoshop to gradually blur the ground from the bottom up, because the distance and zoom compressed the perspective and gave the same detail to the foreground and background, taking away all the depth of the image. The passage into black and white draws the eye to the wealth of texture and detail this photo has, from the little bits of gravel in the asphalt to the thin lines in the reflective layer on the middle section of the traffic cone. Also shot with the TZ3.

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an offer to the shoe gods

This one was Gabriela’s idea, she just took her shoe off and posed it for me to photograph it. Due to the lighting not being perfect, I isolated the background (by Nuno’s suggestion, he and Rita were visiting me while I was processing the pictures) and used a gradient effect to replace the featureless yellowish wall in the background. Removing the colors and tweaking the levels made the fake background mesh up nicely with the foreground, giving it the look of a studio shot. Taken with the TZ3.

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Again, being one of the assignments that was my turn to pick, I always feel a little constrained by not working on someone else’s choice. My greater mobility this week allowed me to go onto the balcony and take some outdoor shots that made the assignment more diverse. Although I now have the EOS 5D to play with, with each new photo I take with the TZ3 I’m more amazed at what this little pocket camera can do, which is a great thing, as I can’t always carry the 5D daily wherever I go!!