Simply Religious
By Brian Auer • May 15th, 2008
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This church in La Jolla, California caught my eye for its stunning white simplicity. The clear blue sky also helped to compliment the building and its elegance. I was on a photowalk, and we had just started down the road toward the beach and everybody was excited to get shooting. And so, I framed the building to include mostly sky while leaving a good portion of the church (and its surroundings) left to the imagination. I took two shots with different compositions of this church top, and this one turned out best.
- Unprocessed RAW
This one turned out a little overexposed. I shot it at f/2 with my 50mm lens and it pushed my shutter speed up to 1/8000, maxing it out. I probably should have set the f-number to at least f/2.8. - Processed RAW
Mainly I just recovered the highlights and darkened the overall image, getting it ready for Photoshop. - LAB Saturation
I saw that the blues were a little muddy, so I ran it through my LAB Saturation Photoshop Action and brought out the color while adding a bit of contrast. - Clone & Sharpen
Somehow I sort of forgot to deal with the little bit of brickwork on the bottom edge, so I took that out with the patch tool. Then I sharpened it up a bit. - Curves Adjustment
I wasn’t totally happy with the tones and colors, so I added a curves adjustment to bring up the highlights and push the shadows down. I left the blending mode to “Normal” so the blues would get a little punch too.
Enjoy!
Brian Auer is a photography enthusiast from North Idaho. He's also the guy behind the Epic Edits Weblog. As a hobbyist photographer since 2003, his passion has been to constantly improve his photography skill set, to share his own knowledge with others, and to become an integral part of the photographic community.
Visit the author's homepage | View all Epic Edits posts by Brian Auer
Great for photo – thanks for including the info on what editing steps you took.
Love the simplicity and vibrant brilliance of this shot. Thanks for the step-by-step.
Hi Brian. I couldn’t help but comment. I grew up in San Diego. My dad was a photographer for the Union-Tribune. I live in New Jersey now but I’m headed out to L.A. and S. D. on vacation Saturday. Seeing your great shot has me excited about the trip. I’m hoping to get some serious “photowalking” time when I’m there.
I’m an avid follower of your RSS. Keep up the good work!
Bob
Hey Bob, that’s really funny. I just moved out here to SD from Jersey (we lived in Flemington). I definitely like it out here better from a photography standpoint — I love the beach towns. Although I do miss the historic buildings and the amazing city back east.
I really like this shot. The simplicity of the shot is what I really like. Showing more of the church or surrounding area just wouldn’t be as powerful.
Hi Brian
Given that it’s got almost no depth of field, I wonder whether it would have looked any different if you’d amped your aperture up to f22 even? Why open it up so much? Regardless, lovely result!
=) Marc
I suppose the lens was set a tiny bit too wide open. When I do street photography, I usually leave my 50mm lens set between f/2 and f/3.5. Any wider and I end up maxing out my shutter speed in daylight settings. Any smaller and I run the shutter speed so low that I get too much motion blur. So having the lens at f/2 for this shot was probably just out of laziness. If I wanted to get things slightly sharper, I probably could have stopped down to f/3.5 or f/4. But given that I was some distance away from the building and I wasn’t shooting “wide open” I figured it would be fine for overall sharpness and dof. Even stopping down to f/22 probably wouldn’t have yielded any different results.
Fantastic photo, Brian.
Dont know how to explain but it really captured me.
What a beautiful picture. One of the things I loved about California back when I lived there was the sky. Nowehere in the country does the sky look like that. Just wonderful.
Brian you did a great job capturing this La Jolla landmark. My family has been attending church here for years and you really took a beautiful shot of it. Thanks for sharing. Also great work on the post editing, you really know how to use the tools you have.