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The Brick
15 July 2019
Coastal fog blankets our garden most of the summer but every now and then the sun keeps the marine layer at bay and we have a well-lit garden begging for photos.
The Brick. Captured at f11, 1/125 second and ISO 200. Processed with Piccure+ and Adobe Camera Raw.
On the most recent occasion, we grabbed the Olympus E-PL1 with the Lensbaby Tilt Transformer and put a Lensbaby Composer Pro on it with a +4 macro converter. The aperture disk in the Composer Pro was f11.
The immediate focus of our attention was a tiny rose that had just bloomed. Then we caught up with our apples, which are easier to find now that they've grown larger than pearls. And a few flowers, of course.
Everything looks better in sunlight.
We tried a few out-of-focus experiments, too, flooding the image with indistinct color.
Then we turned to a few inanimate objects, lining up the old faucet, a split redwood planter and this old and battered brick.
Everything looks better in sunlight.
But the camera work was just the beginning. We jumped through an extra hoop with these Olympus images after saving the Raw files as DNGs.
That extra hoop was Piccure+, which uses some clever image analysis to make a few lens optimizations that improve the quality of any image. There are some lenses in our bag that always cry out for Piccure+.
That produces a TIFF that we ran through Adobe Camera Raw on our way to the 500-pixel thumbnail we publish here. We couldn't help increasing the Clarity and dropping the Shadows to black.
But we didn't sharpen the thumbnail this time. It was sharp enough.
There's something nauseating about over-sharpened images. We got a dose today as we toured our sources for Around The Horn. There are a couple of practitioners who just can't help oversharpening. We get dizzy and try not to look down.
As with everything else, moderation is often a neglected option.
It just happens to be sunny again today. But when the fog rolls in and we are feeling its chill, we're going to pull up this image.
It radiates warmth like a beach at noon.