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Friday Slide Show: Il Fornaio
30 January 2015
The doctor had not sent a prescription to the pharmacy before lunch and rather than wait and wait and wait, we decided to have lunch. But where? We drove south to Burlingame where we found street parking and a nearly empty Il Fornaio.
We've been going there for years when looking a place close to the airport or just wanted to get out of town for a while. The large shaded room with the linen tablecloths is our idea of a hideaway.
Our waiter was charming. An older fellow, his manners were impeccable. We felt taken care of, our desires as important as our needs.
We lingered. A glass of wine with the grilled petrale. An espresso. No rush. The prescription would wait for us this time.
The room had charmed us, too. What was it about it? The natural light. The tools of the trade.
We took out the little Olympus PEN we had with us and took a few shots, restricting the aspect ratio to a square frame. We put it away. We took it out again. And again. We couldn't stop. The more we looked around, the more we saw.
We shot in Aperture Priority mode to control focus. ISO (set to Auto) went all over the place from 320 to 1600. It wasn't really as bright as it looked. And we were stopped down to f8.0 for some of the shots, wide open on others.
We processed the Raw files converted to DNGs in Lightroom 5 the way we always do but we were a bit disappointed. There was something missing. A richness. We almost felt as if we had used a disposable camera.
So we ran the original Raw files through Piccure+, creating TIFFs we imported into Lightroom. The difference was dramatic. The richness we had observed was restored.
The crop was lost but that wasn't a problem. We had to edit these anyway. A little Clarity, Shadows and Highlight adjustments and, most importantly, Luminance and Color Noise Reduction. We used the detail window to monitor the effect of our noise adjustments.
Now whenever we need an escape, we can look through these images to get that feeling again of having all the time in the world. And a remedy for what ails us ready to be picked up.
