Finally, I’ve made it to the Luftwerk SOLARise installation at the Garfield Park Conservatory for their evening hours. Granted, I barely squeezed it in since the installation came down on Monday and I only got there last Wednesday…but, I made it! I did visit a few months ago while leading a photo tour on the ‘L’ , however, during daylight – definitely a different vibe to the installations.
If you follow me at all you know I despise tripods, and despite bringing one along I still couldn’t bring myself to use it. I mostly played around with a few abstracts and plays on light from the Prismatic Luftwerk installation. Way more fun than setting up the dreaded tripod 😉
Also,  in my edits of these images I used some new presets. Full disclosure, sleeklens sent these to me for free to try out as long as I shared my thoughts on them. No problem since I often use presets in Photoshop. This time it was nice to do all of my edits solely in Lightroom, as these are LR presets. They shared their Brick & Mortar preset with me since most of what I do is architecture but they have a full catalog of presets for other types of photography (check here if you’re interested). In this post, and my next one with some more traditional architecture shots, I’ll share my thoughts in case you’re interested.
So, there are A LOT of options (78 to be exact) in this one grouping of presets. With most presets I use I have a tendency to use the same ones over and over. However, I did try many of them out. But to remain honest and consistent to how I edit I used a combination of the presets listed below for the first 3 images:
Contrast & Clarity
Details Enhancer
Good Start for Cityscape
Darker Shadows
More Contrast
More Clarity
Vignette
Autumn Park
Warmer



In the lead image of this post and the 2 images below I used these 4 presets:
Darker Shadows
More Highlights
Vignette
Autumn Park
I tend to prefer more subtle editing and don’t like things to look too processed. But if you’re a fan of presets, I do recommend these as there are many options, they’re stackable and the price is very affordable. Check out all the options here.