New Orleans: Day 1

First things first: I had a wonderful time in New Orleans on my National Geographic Weekend Photo Expedition. I met some great people, both as part of the program and the locals, learned a lot, and got better (I hope). It was wonderful to meet Tyrone, Jennifer and Krista and they worked hard to make sure we had a good time and a great experience. I'm already trying to figure out which one to do next. Tucson or Santa Fe look mighty interesting... There is far too much to detail in a single post so I'm going to be writing about the weekend for several posts to come.

How it worked: For the 2 full days of the workshop, we went out to shoot with a specific focus in mind. We were out for 3-4 hours and then returned to the classroom to review our take. We were each expected to pick our top 20 images from the day and then sit with one of the instructors (Tyrone one day, Jennifer the next) to critique those 20. As part of the critique, they would pick their top 3 or 4 images to be displayed for comment to the entire group. The critiques were an extremely useful vehicle for learning what to look for in a photo, particularly as we were encouraged to listen in on each other's critiques when we had the time.

Day 1 officially began at 9am. However, about half of us met Tyrone in Jackson Square at 5:45am to catch the sunrise and beautiful early morning light. I ended up selecting a couple of these in my 20 for the day (more in a future post), including this one of the St. Louis Cathedral.

Fiddler on the Roof

Ok, so it's a bad joke. "Sunrise, Sunset" is the name of one of the songs in the musical "Fiddler on the Roof", one of the classics and one where I still know most of the music despite never having actually seen it on stage, only on film.

What's that have to do with photography? Nothing, except that today's post is a short and sweet one about sunrises and sunsets. These shots are all about playing with the White Balance setting on the camera to enhance the colors rendered by the camera. Facebook friends have already seen them.

The sunrises are first (well, duh) and were shot with the camera set for a standard, cloudy white balance. For these shots, I had to boost blacks and highlights to improve the contrast, and boost the saturation of the reds and yellows just slightly (all in Lightroom). With a little more time to fiddle with the camera, I probably could have gotten closer to this directly out of the camera but I was trying to snatch the photo in the 3 minutes where the light was just right.

20mm, ISO 800, f/3.5, 1/25 © Richard Critz

20mm, ISO 800, f/3.5, 1/80 © Richard Critz