Three Cloud Versions

Have not been posting for a while.  I suppose that correlates with the waning interest that I usually have for photography in late Summer.  At least I have noticed for the last several years my photographic output declines a lot in August and early September.  Probably things will pick up now that Fall is starting to show itself here.

Usually I talk about film cameras here, however I do have a liking for various methods of changing photos. The photo above is from a digital raw file.  It is a pretty straight forward version of a cloud from last summer.  I think all I did to it was use curves to improve the contrast and added a little sharpening.

The second versions comes from using Photomatix on the single raw file.  This works pretty well if the photo is taken using a low ISO.  At least with my camera an ISO higher than 800 will result in a lot of noise when processed by Photomatix.

The last image is the Photomatix one when ran through Silver Efex Pro 2. Of the black and white conversion tools that I have tried I like Silver Efex the best. Although I probably wouldn't have paid the full price for it.  I was lucky in that I bought another Nik plugin a while back and then later got the whole Nik bundle as a bonus. Still I do still prefer the results from real black and white film.

So while I have been doing a lot of my photography in film the past few years I am not immune to the charms of digital along with Photoshop and its plugins.