San Francisco Photos - Edited

I know, I've been back from San Francisco for almost two weeks, and I'm just finally getting around to posting the photos from it. Well, I have over 400 of them in RAW format (so each photo is upwards of 10 MB) that I've been sorting through and converting to smaller JPGs that can be posted online. In a desperate attempt to get something posted, I played with a few photos in Aperture and Photoshop and will show you the befores and afters.

My first photo is of the sunset we saw on our way back to the city from Carmel.

For this photo, I was all the way zoomed out with a focal length of 18mm. My f-number was f/4.5, which is fairly low to let more light in. The shutter speed was 1/125th of a second, which isn't too, too fast but isn't slow either. I think it's easier to get shots like this with a higher shutter speed and lower f-number, so there's a lower chance of blurring.

Here is the edited version. As you can see, the colors are a little brighter and more vivid. I altered this in Aperture by pumping up the saturation and then brushing it into the sky, leaving the water and sand alone. I didn't really do much to this photo, because the content is fairly simple.









My second photo is of a rose we passed while descending the stairs from Coit Tower. This is just the first of many flower photos you'll probably see -- I think about half of the 400 photos I took were of flowers.

I used my 50mm fixed lens for this shot, so I could get really good focus on the flower while blurring out the background. To do that, I used the low f-number of f/2.5 and then a fast shutter speed (1/2,500 of a second) to compensate, since it was bright outside.

Here is the edited version. All I did here was crop the photo so the rose is more of the focal point. Then I eliminated the color saturation on the entire photo and brushed back in the color of the flower.










This final photo I took from a moving trolley, so it wasn't ideal right off the bat.

As you can see, it's a bit over-exposed and framed a little strangely. The focal length on this shot was 27mm with f/5.6 aperture and 1/400th of a second shutter speed.

I used Photoshop for this image. First I cropped it a little bit and then removed the building from the upper left corner of the image using the clone tool. Then I edited out the flag that was on the bottom, next to the tree. These are things that are more difficult to do in Aperture, since it's more of a post-processing application instead of photo editing. Finally, I slightly adjusted the exposure for the entire photo and then focused in on the steeple using the burn tool.