Welcome to #ThrowbackThursday the Second.
In the previous ThrowbackThursday post, I shared several old photos from my original Digital Rebel from my 2006 semester abroad in Europe, where I made mention of my lack of wider ‘scene’ shots being due to the lack of a proper wide-angle lens at the time. That’s where my trusty Canon Powershot SD400 point-and-shoot camera came in handy.
As you can see, I took far more photos with that little camera than my DSLR during my travels because even if it was only 4MP as opposed to the Digital Rebel’s 6MP, it got the job done better. I know a lot of people think to take a good photo, you need a ‘good’ camera, but the SD400, at an estimated retail price of $370, really knocked it out of the park for some shots, even for an inexperienced photographer like I was at the time.
Once again, I’m showing my before & after edits of the JPGs, as well as the final, edited image on its own. Please note that I cropped the original size ratio of the SD400′s images to match the ration of DSLR images out of personal preference, and used only Lightroom 4 for all my processing. Also, click the images to see them bigger!
This first image was taken before I even touched down in Europe. My journey across two oceans had me fly from Honolulu to San Francisco, and then San Francisco all the way to Frankfurt, Germany, which is hands-down the longest flight I’ve ever been on. After waking up to an early morning sun shining through my window, I peered out and spotted the first snowy countryside I’d seen since I was a young child. (The light spattering of snow we get on Maui doesn’t really count.)
There was also a haze that was unfamiliar to me, as well as streaks in the sky from all the air traffic, which made for fantastic atmospheric effects, so I snapped some photos through the plane window. This is the first of several photos I took through the window of a moving vehicle, but as long as you avoid having a reflection in the window, it works out just fine.
Editing this one is pretty straightforward – just a matter of bringing out the contrast and detail, with a little vibrancy for good measure. I’m glad I somehow managed to not over-expose this shot too badly, even without understanding manual exposure controls on a point-and-shoot.
