Aviation Photography - Lightroom Photo Edit

It’s not everyday a helicopter flies so close to my house, when that happened today aviation photography came to the front and I captured a shot. The image was far from perfect so in this video I take you through my editing process to bring it up to scratch. Get Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop today - https://www.firstmanphotography.com/get/photography-plan

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Aviation Photography

I must admit that I am not the biggest fan of aviation photography. I really dislike shots that feature an aircraft surrounded by nothing but blue sky. This is especially the case when the rotor blades of helicopters are frozen in time.

To capture the image of the helicopter today I used my Canon 400mm f5.6L lens. I stuck it out the window, whilst handholding, and took the shot having waited for the chopper to get into a good position where I was happy with the composition.

I much prefer aviation photography when there is a sense of movement in the image. To achieve this I reduced my shutter speed down to 1/50 second. The chopper was hovering so I managed to hold the camera steady enough to capture the image with some lovely movement in the rotor blades. This caused a slight loss in sharpness and the image is far from perfect but in the video I walk you through the steps I took to bring it up to scratch.

In the video I also use the clone stamp tool in Adobe Photoshop to remove an irritating telephone wire that I could not prevent being in my frame.  Watch this Aviation Photography Lightroom photo edit it now to see how I post-processed the image.

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How to Use the Patch Tool in Photoshop

Remove objects from your images with the patch tool.

In this video tutorial we show you how to use the patch tool in Adobe Photoshop. This is the third tutorial covering the tools used to remove items, objects and blemishes from your images in Photoshop. The other two tool are the clone stamp tool and the spot healing brush/spot removal tool. The links below show the tutorials for those two tool.

Clone Stamp - https://www.firstmanphotography.com/tutorials/remove-objects-using-the-clone-stamp-tool

Spot Healing - https://www.firstmanphotography.com/tutorials/how-to-remove-spots-in-photoshop

The patch tool works by drawing a selection around the area you want to remove and then dragging the selection area to a point on the image you want to copy. The tool is intelligent and samples the copied area’s texture and patches it over the original selection maintaining the tones from the original area. The allows you to remove more complex shapes from your image that would otherwise be difficult using the clone stamp tool or the spot healing brush.

The patch tool can also be used in reverse to copy an object or item and repeat it several times like the stones in the tutorial image. This can be useful when extra detail is required in your images.

The image in the video is of Fewstone Reservoir in the Yorkshire Dales. I captured this panoramic image by stitching together around eight images each of which had a 20 second exposure. The images are then easily combined in Photoshop and I will show you how to do this in an upcoming tutorial.

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Infrared Photography - Part 2 - Editing

How to Edit Infrared Photos in Photoshop and Lightroom

In this video tutorial we show you how to edit infrared photos from the raw red image that comes out of the camera.

If you have never seen Infrared Photography before then come and feast your senses. Capturing the light normally invisible to human eyes opens up a world of creative possibilities that would otherwise not exist.

This video tutorial is split into two parts with the first part showing you how to capture the raw infrared image whilst on location. This second part will guide you through the post processing where we bring our plain red image to life.

Watch part one on capturing the image. http://www.firstmanphotography.com/tutorials/infrared-photography-part-1

To shoot infrared photography you do not need a special type of converted camera. The only requirement is a small investment in an infrared filter that will attach to your current lens. These filters remove all the colours of the spectrum apart from the wavelengths at the extreme red end which includes infrared. I recommend the Hoya R72 Infrared Filter and this can be purchased for between £30 and £90 depending on the size of your lens, see the link below. The only drawback with this filter is it lets only a small amount of light through so to properly expose an image it will require a long exposure. Whilst this makes portraits tricky there are still endless possibilities in the realm of landscapes and cityscapes and there are not many photographers out there doing it. Just check Flickr to confirm this.

The characteristics of infrared light differ from that of 'normal' white light we are used to experiencing everyday. For example, green foliage such as grass and trees reflect a large amount of infrared light meaning they will be very bright in your final processed image. This is known as the 'Wood Effect' named after Robert W. Wood who pioneered Infrared photography. It is caused by the transparency of chlorophyll to infrared light allowing the light to pass through into the cells of the plants and be reflected back again. Viewed normally, chlorophyll will reflect all the green light back giving leaves and grass it's green appearance.

Capturing infrared photography in this way requires a long exposure. Please see the long exposure tutorial here:

http://www.firstmanphotography.com/tutorials/long-exposure-photography-tutorial

Hoya Infrared R72 Filter