I was lucky enough to be able to take my camera up in a helicopter around Sydney, and accidentally took this really nice pair of photos. The camera started tracking focus of the rain on the windscreen and I happened to snap an out-of-focus opera house in the background, with some nice colour in the harbour.
Both taken with a polarising filter to cut down on reflections and get more vivid colour in the water.
The trick to getting empty streets is to go walking during the rain while sensible people are inside.
The ultra wide is actually quite nice sometimes!
The weather at Montserrat today was absolutely terrible, walked up to the Sant Jeroni peak despite the clouds restricting visibility to like 50 metres. However, just below the clouds there was some sun sneaking through which made for some beautiful shots across to the monastery and down to the lower hills.
Presets proving themselves to work on photos of things that aren’t buildings.
At this point I’m so happy with my little preset that taking nice phone photos is like shooting fish in a barrel.
Point phone at nice building. Apply preset. Ta daa!
The other trick with these overcast photos is to use the automatic sky selection in Photomator to create a second set of adjustments and add more texture and clarity to the clouds, as well as dropping the exposure slightly. This gives you a much more distinctive sky, without turning the rest of the photo into an over-contrasted mess.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised about how good the ML sky detection is, I’m always worried that I’ll end up with a garish border. Not sure if this is just because I’m taking pictures of buildings with well-defined edges, or because I’m just looking at these on a little phone screen.
On this trip I haven’t brought a computer to edit photos from my a6500 on (ok I’ve got my iPad but that’s a whole other thing) which has led me to spend a bunch more time editing my phone photos.
Through a combination of copy/pasting adjustments between similar photos, and saving some presets, I can quickly and consistently get pretty good results.
These ones aren’t actually too heavily reliant on presets, but are the starting point of the style I settled on. It’s basically just some exposure adjustments (raising the shadows), boosting the clarity and texture, accentuating the colour and brightness of the walls, and adding a mild vignette.
The overcast weather meant there wasn’t a lot of room for playing with the light, but I think this really helped the phone capture the scene better. Without a lot of dynamic range—everything is pretty washed out—you’re free to add contrast back in yourself later.
I think one of the things I struggle with in photography is how to deal with a beautiful blue sky. I just can’t stand to leave it there. Instead I’m compelled to desaturate it or obscure it somehow.
Here I opted to wash out the whole image and restrict it to black and white, so the saturated sky disappears. You still get the feeling of a sunny day, but it doesn’t look like a cartoon, which fits in more with the mood of the photo.
It’s really hard to take pictures of surfers because they don’t hold still.
The first photo is an ~11-shot panorama with every shot taken fully zoomed in. This makes it super high resolution and a bit sharper than the second photo which is just a single shot.
Some shots from a morning swim. Black and white to move away from the blue-and-orange that is typical of the Sydney coastline.
Arrived with about 2 minutes to get ready before the fireworks started. There was a huge crowd so nowhere to setup the tripod. I ended up perched on top of a wall with the tripod mostly collapsed and almost falling off the wall.
