White House up in the Clouds

Opportunity, timing and position are well know cornerstones in capturing fleeting moments. Sometimes it's even a suggestion.

While sitting on the patio in San Miguel de Allende my wife suggested that I photograph a white house on the cliff-side that was surrounded by clouds.

When I first looked up it didn't look that interesting but after getting the camera out and setting it up, the above cloud formation moved in creating a striking visual effect. The columns and rounded domes of the house are re-enforced by similar but looser structures in the cloud.

 original image out of camera

The original image looks interesting but is a little flat and static.
The changes I made were to add clarity +87 to increase contrast of clouds and house, increase highlights +60 to make the clouds and house even brighter and reduce both luminance and saturation of the blues and cyans in camera RAW.

In Photoshop, I decreased the saturation and luminance of the greens and oranges to keep mainly 2 dominant colors of white and blue.

Adding contrast to the clouds almost make them appear to explode around the house.

Niels Henriksen

Sections of Buildings in San Miguel de Allende

The photos displayed in the blog article focus mainly on parts or sections of buildings in San Miguel. While some photos, such as the image below, are clearly understood.  The rest have more of an abstract genre and for these the lines become the main compositional elements.

Within the city, the walls along with the sidewalks are continuous, except for the odd entrance to an inner courtyard or alley way.  In the photo above, this wall is most likely not part of a house, but used more as a high fence to an inner courtyard. Inside could be a rubble heap or a grand garden and fountain. Never knowing what you'll find behind these walls is one of the intriguing aspects of San Miguel.

On the  walls in the courtyard of Bellas Artes (the National Institute of Fine Arts)  these lanterns hang on the abutments on the adjacent walls. The darker brickwork along these abutments were darkened and made more gritter to enhance the texture of the lanterns.

This image is from the same courtyard of Bellas Artes, the photo above with the lanterns, but here I'm looking from across the street and the 3 curved protrusions are form the top of the outer wall.

Atotonilco is a UNESCO world historic site (church) about 20 mi out of San Miguel. It's only a short distance from here to the Hots Springs which is a favourite spot for many people in San Miguel. On Saturdays in the village (50 people)  there are many street vendors  selling unique religious objects.

Within the core of San Miguel is a Bull Fighting Ring. Only a few blocks from the central square (el Jardin) of the town. In the photo above you can just see the top the homes which abut to the walls all around the Bull Ring.  There were no events or spectators on this day and this allowed me to take photos of the beautiful curved lines of a circular bull ring.

While walking around I just couldn't resit this bit of abstraction with the 2 different lanterns and their corresponding shadows.

Niels Henriksen

San Miguel de Allende - Part 1

Well, I have now been in San Miguel for 3 weeks and there has been some adjustment for a person who lives in the cold. But these are the foundations for good stories at least looking from the rear view mirror.

San Miguel is situated at 6,000 feet and therefore the heat from the direct sun is more intense. Even fully clothed it seems to go right through you. The air is thinner and very dry and while you don't seem to sweat you are still loosing a great amount of water.

It is so true what the say here at least for newbies. Drink lots of water and only walk on the shady side of the street.

San Miguel is a world heritage site and once here, it is quite evident why.

Most of the buildings have strong burnt orange and yellow painted exteriors. Here I wanted the tree shadows to add texture and more interest to the strong colors.

Some people are not afraid of strong colors as is shown by the blue exterior accented with yellow and green.

Just having images of colorful buildings after a while can be boring so having other context such as humans, animals of events create that focal interest as can be seen by the worker with his feet dangling out the window. Even his orange vest compliments the wall colors.

I only have my laptop with me and it's not color calibrated and by inherent design, have a strong contrast and high color temperature. It will be interesting to see how the look at home. I will redo the RAW on a color calibrated computer and compare them.

The Laser light show on the 'La Paroquia the dominant attraction in San Miguel de Allende and bordering 'Le Jardin', is quite vivid and interesting to watch. At one point they had vines growing up around the towers and spires.

And we mustn't forget the street dancers.

Scary but fun to watch. These night scenes were all shot at ISO 6400 and are only lit by yellow street lamps. It's therefore hard to extract any true colours.

Niels Henriksen

The Old Port Harbour of Dragør in Copenhagen, Denmark

With the winter weather now settling well within Canada and now I hear also across most of Europe with a blanket of white, I thought I would post a few sunnier and warmer images from a day excursion to Dragør. An Old sea-side district of Copenhagen.

This is the one of the main streets along the bus route as you first arrive in Dragør.  To the right is were the harbour and the older historic buildings are located and on the left is the more traditional style of houses. We shall go right and venture back in time.

For many centuries Dragør was a small fishing village dating back to the 12th century about 15km from centre of Copenhagen. But over time Copenhagen has grown to include this area. The fishing port is still active today, but from the boats in the harbour most I would guess are not for commercial fishing.

The first part of the name, Drag-, refers to drawing (dragging) boats ashore. The ending -ør is common in Scandinavian place names and means a beach covered in sand or gravel.

As we leave the main route and venture down the side streets, the roads are all cobblestone and narrow. Never designed for cars and only locals are allowed to drive here, if you can call it that.  As far as I could tell there were no parked cars in these areas or even garages for cars. So the residents must park elsewhere.

Immediately you have a feeling of slowing down to a more leisurely pace. Maybe not as slow as the gentleman in this image but slower.  With street photography, you take what you get. I wished he had been a little more to the left by a few feet.

While most of the building are the traditional danish yellow there is interesting texture in the walls and stonework. There is also interesting discoveries behind high fenced yards.

Many of the buildings have quaint and secluded yards interwoven with trees, shrubs and flowers. Without the sound of cars and other street noise, this just has to be a perfect place for reflection. Still lots of thatched roofs to be found here and easy to imagine that you are 200 years in the past. This has become a very trendy area for the wealthy from Copenhagen as they are very expensive to purchase

From the letters on the building wall you can see the date of 1742 and therefore it must be one of the more modern buildings in town.

On the harbour front side the building attend to the more commercial needs of tourist and sailors.

You can see how the building has had additions added and I guess at that time not many building codes in effect.

To all  a very Merry Christmas and the best seasons greetings to those of other faiths and a great New Year filled with exciting photography opportunities.

Niels Henriksen

Painterly Effect with Photo Enhancement Techniques

While deciding on an image to work on and achieve something special, I remembered a scene while in Copenhagen this spring. It was early morning and there was this lovely textured stucco wall in the dappled light with bicycles, benches and an old oak tree (at least some majestic type).

In reviewing file archives, I found that I had only taken 4 images in the entrance square to the Frederiksberg castle grounds in Copenhagen. Of the 4, there was only one that caught my eye. I now wish I had spent at least a couple of hours, if not all day, here to watch how the sun changes the light in the courtyard and how reflected light modifies the local colours.

The scene is interesting enough with good texture and detail but I wanted something more atmospheric of this place. The approach I took was to deviate from a photograph look and experiment with more layers made up of pieces of the original image. I wasn’t sure where, exactly, I was going with the outcome but it was fun just to watch as I adjusted the modes of the new layers.

The image below is the version that I like best in trying to achieve a glowing watercolour rendition. A light cream-coloured, watercolor textured paper would even soften some of the lines a bit more.

Click to see 1024 pixel image

In working with Photoshop or other pixel-editing tools you have key choices of color, contrast and edges. The effect I was after was to soften the image and add some glow while for some essential edges, enhance contrast to give extra texture and definition.

Duplicating the base layer, increasing its size by 25 pixels on each edge and then doing a gaussian blur of 5 pixels would achieve the glowing effect (faux Orton effect). The final effect accomplished by setting the blurred adjustment layer was set to overlay mode and add a curves adjustment layer, attached directly, to fine-tune contrast adjustments within the image. Then opacity to taste.

I wanted various ranges of detail texture so, to achieve this I duplicated the base layer 3 times. Each of these 3 layers received a different gaussian amount of 5, 10 and 25. I then ran the Photoshop pencil effect on each of the different blurred images. As you blur more then fine lines start to disappear and others become stronger. This would give me possible overlays or masks from fine to strong detail to hand-tune different parts with detail.

With each of the 3 edge contrast layers I would step through the adjustments from Darken to Hue adjustment and observe the effects. If there was a section that interested me, I would mask it in and move on to the next layer and once again step through the various modes.


In the above photo image I like the pairing on the contrasting analogous colours (the orange wall, red hydrant and violet bike) being complimentary of the green foliage colours and the cool shadows and it’s these contrasts that I tried to magnify in the first enhanced version.

I now realize that there are so many more images from different angles and lighting, but it’s now so far away.

The 6 images below show the experimentations and progress towards the final version.


Do click image for a full size image or 1600 x pixels for the various versions I went through.

The changes affect the green leaves, window detail and detail and colour of shadows on sidewalk. The final image (first in this article) is made using the bottom right image on colour mode to the middle image top row.

Maybe you like one of these better.


Niels Henriksen