Boston in Color
This photo was taken right besides Boston Logan Int. Airport facing towards downtown Boston. I got there right in time to snap this picture as the clouds had made the slightest opening for the sun to peek through and reflect down on the water. This was also in the middle of rain showers, as in the top left you can see the rain falling from the clouds. The rain and clouds added some cool compositional features and especially color. I did some rough color adjustment to bring out the purples and yellows, but most of it is all natural. When editing the photo I tried to compose it as if it were a city scape, there is a very visible gradient from left to right, from a dark blue, to a warm yellowish orange. This city is right in the middle with a lot of head room for the texture of the clouds and Boston Harbor. Overall, I would say this is probably the best image I've taken this year.
New York's Golden Hour
I took this photo atop the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. This is a view of Upper Manhattan. I took this last year in December of 2019, so my photography skills were extremely rusty, but with the power of photoshop I was able to make this into what I would think is a half decent image of the Upper Manhattan sky line. When I initially took this photo, I had no plan or any idea of framing. However because I took this on a Canon 6D which has a resolution of 20 mega pixels, I was able to reframe it in photoshop. I also adjusted the colors to have a more brown-blue color pallet, over the initial yellow, green, blue, and orange, which in my opinion is horrible. I also sharpened the image up in photoshop and using minor stacking from other similar photos I took because when I took this image I had the focus on auto, and the camera auto-focused to the buildings closer to me, leaving the main subject of my image out of focus. The finial image is the best I could do with what I had, it was definitely a challenge though.
Tropical Honolulu
This is a photo I took atop of one of dormant volcanos next to Honolulu, Hawaii. I took this back in 2018, before I had access to any sort of DSLR or good phone camera. So I used what I had and took this with the off brand phone I had at the time. I highly doubt this image would even be considered high definition. Even though I did not have the proper equipment at the time to take this image, I could not exclude this image just because of how perfect everything else is. The framing is near perfect and the clouds rolling in over the top as visually interesting aspects in what would normally be negative space, and the clouds also have an amazing leading line effect that draws your eye towards the center of the image, where the city is. I did bring this photo into photoshop initially because I wanted to experiment with stacking other similar images I took to increase the resolution of the image, however I opted not to do this and left the photo un-edited. Looking back on this, I wish I could go back there with a DSLR, who knows how good of a picture I could've gotten.
New San Juan, from Old San Juan
In this photo I tried to go for a filmic look. When I took this image back in February of 2020 I was just getting into astrophotography, and because of that I had purchased a night time filter for my camera. Well when I took this image, I had forgotten that I had the filter on, which gave the raw image a strong blue tint. When I went to edit these images, I realized that I had made a mistake by keeping the filter on, however I also realized something cool. When I balanced the colors, the images looked like they had been taken with a film camera, and because San Juan is a decently old City, I decided that was the overall effect that I would aim for. I first balanced the colors, and then gave it a warm green tint to fit a kind of sea port feeling. I re framed it a little more, and then I had my final image. The mistakes that I made when taking this photo led to a much more interesting final image.