Taken in Chicago on October 29, 2007. Manual Exposure, 1/80 sec, f/6.3, ISO 200, Nikon Raw Format. Edited in Lightroom 2.0 Beta.
See Alive on Black Mat Background

While walking from the Sears Tower to Millennium Park last year in Chicago we came across this piece of modern art located in a square of considerable size. I took a few exposures but really like this one with the ledge, birds, and people eating in the foreground. I found this scene incredible interesting and would have loved to spend more time there. The color of this piece really sets it apart from its surroundings which gave me the idea for the shot.

I brought this shot into the develop module of Adobe Lightroom 2.0 Beta and removed all color from the photo except red and orange (using the color channel saturation sliders). I increased the saturation of red and orange until the piece really jumped out of the shot. Their wasn’t much red left in the shot at this point but a lot of orange in the leaves, people, and in reflections on the building. To remove these colors I used the retouch tool (amazing). To do this I activated the tool and selected options to remove color wherever I painted. Using this method it didn’t take long for me to remove the rest of the color from the scene.

The buildings on the left side were much brighter than the rest of the shot so I darkened those slightly by painting on them using the exposure setting of the retouch tool. I followed these edits by adding contrast, a little sharpening, and some keywords or tags.

In the print module I added our Snow Photography logo and a 4 pixel stroke border (you can see this better if you click the link above to see the photo on a black background) then exported the photo as a high quality sRGB jpg file. The adjustments I made to this photo really accentuated the “living” quality of the piece. I’m a little worried that this will come alive and become the next super villain (“Blade”, the mutated Gillette Mach 5 Razor).