How I Shot This (1)

I was at ARPC church camp @ Hotel Palace of Golden Horses, KL last week. And I walked around a bit, seeing what would be interesting to shoot. I saw the sun setting-ish, and thought it would make an interesting shot, so I shot the scene using my D90 + Tokina 11-16, setting it at 11mm, switched to manual shooting mode with aperture at F8; shutter speed 1/1250 (based on the sky exposure); ISO200 at RAW. I shot 6 shots actually, but only the middle 3 were used, see below.

Just note that this is w/o ANY processing, no in-camera or Lightroom processing, so it looks pretty dull. With Lightroom, I import all my pictures now using the adobe provided "Direct Positive +" preset. Due to the uneven light, I pulled my "highlights" slider to -100; "shadows" to +100; boosted the "clarity" and "contrasts" a little, and this gave me

So it's starting to look a bit better. Now, behind me, there's a "lake" so I couldn't move back. And I wanted all the palm trees in the picture, with a bit of space on the left - which is why I decided to shoot a few (6 in all). When I tried to stitch all 6, it was really warped/distorted, so I experimented with 1 less picture, until I thought the 3 looked best.

I use Microsoft's Image Composite Editor, which is the best free stitching program I've tried, and it gave me this. This is probably what the eye "naturally" sees.

But I wanted to give the clouds a bit more of a dramatic edge, so importing it back into Lightroom, I again pulled the highlights to -100 (to soften the brightness of the sun), shadows to +100 (bring out details in the shadows, else it is too dark); boosted the contrasts and clarity again (just gives more definition to the clouds, but the downside is that the trees look "artificial" with a bit of ugly halo, but it's a bit of a compromise) -it won't be everyone's taste, but I prefer it. There's this HDR quality which I'm not all that fond off on the trees, but I loved the effect on the clouds.

The end product is the picture right in the top!
This is for Bryan Kam, one of my photo mentors who helped me tremendously when I just started out, 1.5 years back, who was curious how I got the shot. So it's a step-by-step tutorial.

I just have to say Lightroom is a really great tool, and can't recommend it enough. It is easy to use, and very powerful (I'm only using the tip of the software's ability, and still lots to learn - thus my post processing isn't all that good, but I'm experimenting and learning).

Keep shooting and learning new stuff to try!