On the Streets: Cornish, Rainier, and Lightroom

On the Streets: Cornish, Rainier, and Lightroom

I took my Fujifilm XT2 and 10-24mm lens out the other day to get some practice with it. I think it’s a great lens, but I’m not confident with it yet. I think that anytime you get below 16mm with the XT2’s 24.3MP X-Trans™ CMOS III, an APS-C sensor you’re at risk of having that overdone wide angle look. I’ve seen great shots by photographers in the 10mm – 16mm range, but most of mine look gimmicky at those wide angles, akin to the days of the fish eye lens craze.

I live in Seattle’s Capitol Hill, at the northern end of Broadway, sometimes referred to as the quieter side of Broadway, well away from the weekend madness of the Pike Pine corridor. (There were a lot of commas in that sentence, but I’m leaving it as is for now.) I grabbed some shots of the Cornish School for the Arts and the Rainier Chapter House.

For one of the Cornish shots I exported different “transformed” versions. I don’t know a better description for that. In Lightroom’s Develop module there is a Transform section that will try to use Lightroom’s processing algorithms to help straighten photos and correct perspectives. It sometimes leads to some crazy effects, and I think the images would only be useable after cropping them. That will seem like an oddly obvious statement when you see the images – I just meant that perhaps there’s a next step I’m missing in Lightroom that doesn’t involve cropping.


Guided. I'm definitely not using the Guided function correctly.

Guided. I’m definitely not using the Guided function correctly.


Level.

Level.


Auto.

Auto.


Full. (Lightroom)

Full. (Lightroom)


None.

None.


Scale.

Scale.


Vertical.

Vertical.


Rainier Chapter House, Capitol Hill, Seattle, March 2018.   

Rainier Chapter House, Capitol Hill, Seattle, March 2018.

 


Cornish School for the Arts, Roy Street entrance, Capitol Hill, Seattle, March 2018. I shot this with a 35mm lens before switching to the 10-24. This isn't far off from how it looked straight out of camera.

Cornish School for the Arts, Roy Street entrance, Capitol Hill, Seattle, March 2018. I shot this with a 35mm lens before switching to the 10-24. This isn’t far off from how it looked straight out of camera.

In a previous post I think I made several mistakes about what some of the functions in the Transform module were doing. For example, I mentioned that Vertical would focus on straightening the vertical lines, but I’m pretty sure that was pretty far off the mark. In some cases the Transform features will seek to bring the ground forward or push it back. Have you ever shot a picture of a tall building from the ground? Because you’re not shooting it straight on it can look funny. Have a look at the “None” photo above. To me it looks like the building is falling away from me. Transform tries to address those problems. I think that’s also were tilt-shift lenses come in to play.