East River Sunset Shower (New York)

I found this photo in my rejected images while cleaning up my Lightroom travel photography archives. I took it during a sunset cruise along the East River on my trip to New York about 3 years earlier. The fire boat was spraying the water for the tourists’ amusement, and I was taking photographs against the sun though the water.

I remember I saw the potential in this urban landscape, but was never happy with the composition, and after a few attempts to change the framing by applying different crops in Lightroom I gave up and marked it as rejected.

When I saw this photo again 3 years later, right away I knew exactly what to do; I changed the aspect ratio from 3×2 to panoramic and the composition was dramatically improved. It was ready to be posted. I guess sometimes it takes 5 minutes to process an image, but other times, 3 years.

Deconstructing Featured Photo

Camera: Canon 60D
Lens: Sigma 17-70mm
Focal Length: 19mm
ISO: 100
Aperture: F8
Shutter Speed: 1/160
Bracketing: single shot
Tripod: hand-held

Processing: Single RAW File Processing

Lightroom: straightening, cropping, split toning, export as PSD image
Photoshop: cleaning, noise reduction
Photoshop Plugins:
– Topaz Detail was used to enhance details in areas of the bridge and background buildings
– Topaz DeNoise helped to eliminate noise (river, sky, water spray).

Archiving: I save all my photos as JPEG (quality: 100%) at full resolution and with the help of the Lightroom plugin, I synchronized them with my portfolio on SmugMug for safekeeping, sharing, image hosting and online sales.

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