Singapore @ dusk

This picture was shot from a pedestrian walkway over one of Singapore’s many roads. I was after the typical lighting trails that a slow shutter speed creates, but it was only when I experimented with some manual zooming during the 1.3 second exposure that I got something I liked.

Original Raw-file to the left. Post-processing (mainly increasing Fill Light, using the TAT-tool to brighten the colour of the light trails and rotating and cropping to a square aspect ratio) was done in Lightroom. I’m a big fan of square crops (although I’m less happy with losing 33% of my pixels when doing so). It’s time for Nikon to release the D700x or D800 or whatever the new high-res Full Frame Nikon will be called. Or maybe I’ll switch to a Leica M9. Just have to sell my car to finance it. Although I doubt that selling a 12 year old, dented Volvo will cough up enough cash to get me an M9. Might have to rob a bank, which is probably not a good idea to do on foot. So, I’ll hang on to the Volvo, just in case. But, I digress…

I also made a new Export Preset in Lightroom, allowing me to automatically add a small, 3 pixel high white stroke at the bottom of the picture and then a higher grey stroke with a selection of Exif-data. For this, you need the excellent LR2/Mogrify plugin. It’s donationware, but it’s the best 5 or so dollars I’ve ever spent on a plugin. LR2/Mogrify is king when it comes to adding borders, captions and watermarks. You have unprecedented control over where you put everything. You might have to experiment a little (tip: try out your settings on horizontal as wel as vertical pictures) but once you’ve got it to work the way you like, you only have to add it as a preset and you’re all set. Export presets are a great way to speed up your Lightroom Workflow. I use them all the time, for example for exporting pictures for the blog.

By the way, if you’re looking for the keyboard shortcut to add bullets in the LR2/Mogrify text editor: Alt-Shift-period is for the bullet • and Alt-Shift-l (that is l as in lightroom) gives you the pipe symbol |.

P.S. Those are Azerty keyboard shortcuts on a Mac. I don’t know if they’re the same on a Qwerty keyboard. If you find them to be different, please let us know in the comments.