In my previous blog I shared one of my images from my recent New York trip and would like to share another today. This image was shot on my Panasonic Lumix LX5. It’s captured in RAW format so I can bring out the most detail possible in the cables and bridge stonework. The aperture was f/4.5 which gives more depth of field than I need but I wanted to use a slightly slower shutter speed. It’s probably my nervousness but I always worry about the shutter speed accuracy when I get into very fast numbers. On this particular day the light was very bright and f/4.5 was giving a shutter speed of 1/500 second at ISO80.

Getting the image back home and onto the computer I was quite pleased with the results. This shot of the bridge has been taken many times by many different people so it’s well known and definitely not unique. My intention had been to convert the image to black and white and I had even set my camera to capture both RAW and JPG in black and white. I did this because the RAW file will always be colour where the JPG would be black and white as it’s processed in camera using the selected settings. What I now saw looking at the RAW file was an image that needed colour. The black and white seemed a little flat but in colour there was plenty of punch.

Working with the RAW file in Lightroom I found there was virtually no adjustment needed other than increasing the colour temperature slightly as the stone of the bridge looked too blue. I then added a vignette to darken the edges of the image and hit me. This image reminded me of the 70’s detective shows I had watched as a child. I don’t know if Starsky and Hutch was filmed in New York but this image took me right back to my childhood.

Deciding I wanted to give this more of a 1970’s feel I darkened the vignette further and moved it into Photoshop. Here I selectively coloured the bridge stonework to warm it further and added a very slight green tint to the blue sky. Finally I reduced the saturation slightly with a Hue/Saturation level. I may be dreaming but I felt this gave it a feel as though it had been shot on film back in the 1970’s.

I have now printed the resulting image at A3 and it looks great. Like most of my LX5 shots it seems to cope with being resized and sharpened for print extremely well. I may well now repeat the processing but add a little film grain to complete the effect.

Let me know if this shot reminds you of anything.