Shutter Mike Photography

Railroad Bridge in Sepia

Photoshop CS4 is an amazing tool for photographers.  It offers some very complex and powerful tools for fixing, improving and artistically altering your images.  But it also offers some very basic tools that do not require too much advanced knowledge of Photoshop and most anyone can quickly learn to use.  One of those is adding a sepia tone to an image.   Sepia simply means a brown color tone with a hint of red.

Most actions in CS4 have more than one way to be accomplished.  But one of the easiest ways to get this effect is to use the adjustments tool. Here are the 3 easy steps to take a color image like the one on the right and give it a sepia tone like the one above.

1. From the menu bar at the top go to image>adjustments then select black & white.
2. Your image has now turned black & white and the Black and white dialogue box has opened.  In this box, just below the color sliders is a check box next to the word tint.  Check this box.
3. The default should be a sepia tone.  So you can stop here if you like the coloring.  But if it defaults to another tone or you want to further adjust the sepia color click in the square of color to the right of the word tint and change your color to anything you like.

Chandler Gilbert Community College is part of the Maricopa Community College system in the Phoenix, AZ area.  The college has made a commitment to building all new facilities to be LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design).  Often times going green in architecture means going modern.  The new Ironwood Hall was recently completed and is both “green” and modern.

f/32 – 1/15 sec – ISO 100 – Focal Length 40 mm

f/10 – 1/200 sec – ISO 100 – Focal Length 22 mm

For fans of modern and funky architecture, the Chandler-Gilbert Community College campus is ideal.  Many of the buildings on campus have a modern design.  Steel, glass and concrete are the predominant materials in most of the buildings.  For me, being a fan of modern architecture, this makes it an ideal place to photograph.

I did have a brief “encounter” with a campus security guard while I was shooting there one Sunday.  It was during the winter break so I guess the campus was officially closed (although the gates were open and there were no signs).  As I was photographing the deserted campus a guard in his golf cart came up to me and said “And you are?”  I was not sure how to respond so I very politely gave my name.  He then asked who I was with.  Still not entirely sure what he was getting at, I just explained I was photographing the buildings for personal use and asked if that was OK.  Probably seeing that I was not a threat, he said that it was not a problem and left.  The best way to handle those kinds of “encounters” is to just be polite with no attitude and be honest.

This building is Viad Tower and is in the “uptown” section of Phoenix.  Unlike cities such as New York or Chicago the skyscrapers here have some space between them.  This follows the pattern of the city as a whole, rather spread out and sprawling.  The open space around the base of Viad Tower is used as a park.  Interestingly, there is a sign at the entrance of the park forbidding one from entering it or photographing it.  Look, but don’t touch.

Sometimes finding a subject that interests you and makes you want to photograph it can be difficult.  But if you think “outside the box” and consider subjects beyond a physical object you can broaden your possibilities immensely.  One way to do that is to look at color as the subject.  In a nutshell, that means the actual object is of much less significance and the color of that object becomes the actual subject itself.  Pick any color or combination of colors you like and seek them out regardless where they are or what adorns them.  Reference back to color concepts such as complimentary and analogous colors and just have fun with it to see what you can come up with when you focus on color as the subject of the photograph.