wet fence {59/265}

February 28, 2010 at 7:46 pm (February, Landscape & Outdoors, photoblog)
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

wet fence {59/365}

Another trip to check out the effects of recent rains today. Got to do a bit of 4WD-type driving through all the water…loved it!

This photo gives you a tiny glimpse of the amount of water that is out in this area. The country-side is literally a big pond! Everything is green and just looks fabulous. The only down-side on today’s trip was the lack of sun. Clouds moved in again (and threaten yet more rain!).

This photo was processed in Lightroom. It was obviously made into grayscale, and I then played with the tone sliders and the colour sliders in the grayscale section. This may sound like a contradiction, but each colour slider (i.e. red, orange, green), still has a representative ‘grey’ value. As such, moving the sliders about changes different areas of the image depending on their original colour. For example, in today’s photo, the mound in the middle of the picture is green grass. By darkening the green slider, I got more contrast into the mound. Also, the water was rather brown, so moving the red and orange sliders, I made it darker and nicely contrasting to the top half of the image.

There are a heap more of these images in my flickr photostream if you’re interested to check it out.

1 Comment

need to mow {56/365}

February 28, 2010 at 3:49 pm (February, Landscape & Outdoors, photoblog)

need to mow {56/365}

Launch of my new ‘photo look’ and logo/flickr username.

As mentioned in recent posts, it’s been raining an awful lot. It’s been difficult to find a dry moment to mow the lawn. As such, it looks like a mini-savannah.

The image was processed through UFRaw and GIMP. Auto-levels and a soft light layer was added in GIMP.

1 Comment

bouldy gorge {58/365}

February 28, 2010 at 2:40 pm (February, Landscape & Outdoors, photoblog)
Tags: , , , , , ,

bouldy falls {58/365}

Went a-hikin’ today. First time in a VERY long time (and boy didn’t I feel it the next day! OUCH!).  A couple of photographer friends and I went for a trip out to a local gorge to check out the effect of recent rains. The water has receded a LOT since recent events. In a tragic set of circumstances 2-3 weeks ago, the gorge flash flooded with a number of visitors in there, sadly, a woman lost her life. This was a big reason for why I hadn’t been out there sooner…it was a little too fresh in everyone’s memories and I was too wary.

Now…let’s move off that topic into the processing part.

I was really happy with the SOOC (straight-out-of-the-camera) shot, however, I still decided to process it a little. I added a touch of saturation in UFRaw. In GIMP, all I did was do an auto-levels adjust, add a soft light layer, and done.

I took a number of pictures up there today, check out my flickr photostream to see the rest.

Leave a Comment

my girls {57/365}

February 28, 2010 at 2:26 pm (February, photoblog)
Tags: , , , ,

my girls {57/365}

The only photos I took today were of my girls.

I did a fair bit of processing today….here’s the original photo to get an idea of what I started with:
before image of day 57 photo

The original image was a JPEG, so no RAW processing was done today.

Here’s a list of the adjustments I made in GIMP:

  • Auto-levels
  • Desaturated the base layer using the average selection.
  • Duplicated the base layer and set the duplication at Hardlight 100% opacity.
  • Added the first texture, Magma Galaxy by pareeerica.
  • Set the first layer at Multiply 70% and used the dodge brush over the faces to lighten them up a little through the texture.
  • Added the second texture, SM260210-3 by SkeletalMess.
  • Set this at Dodge 50% opacity and used the smudge brush over a few spots that were on the girls faces to ‘rub them out’. This layer added a more washed out look that I was after. It worked really well with the first layer.

Many thanks to pareeerica and SkelatalMess for their textures used in this image.

Leave a Comment

she’s off! {55/365}

February 26, 2010 at 9:05 am (February)

she's off! {55/365}

This photo was the most representative of my day. I spent a fair bit of it playing with the girls…as I do nearly every day. My youngest is almost to the walking stage and has crawling down to an art form. She’s Formula 1 paced! I like the blur and action in this shot, so now it’s today photo.

Photo edited in Digikam (which I must add, handles RAW files really well!). A small adjustment to some white balance controls, including saturation and exposure, was all I did.

Leave a Comment

novel idea {54/365}

February 26, 2010 at 9:01 am (bokeh, February, photoblog)
Tags: , , , , , ,

novel idea {54/365}

For those who don’t know (which would be nearly all of you…), I’m in the midst of writing a novel…or in the midst of trying to write a novel. I worked on it tonight a little, so decided to use it as inspiration for today’s photo.

Photo processed entirely in Digikam using the in-built editor (quite a powerful little thing!). I adjusted the white balance, levels and curves to get rid of the yellow tinge in the original shot.

Leave a Comment

matchstick {53/365}

February 23, 2010 at 2:34 pm (February, photoblog)

matchstick {53/365}

Another extension tube shot tonight. I put on all of the connectors tonight (to get maximum macro ability). Then I found I had a few problems. Here’s the list:

1.  Availability of light.

When the extension tube is attached to the camera (especially when all connectors are attached), the light needs to be a little brighter to compensate for the shift of the lens from the sensor. At least, this is my prediction anyway, I haven’t actually researched this phenomenon, just observed it only. Regardless, I didn’t have a bright enough light on my target, in this case, matchsticks. This can obviously be worked around using longer exposures, but in my case, everything looked orange due to the warm lighting on my kitchen bench. I helped the situation a little by using a reading lamp, equipped with a cooler, and brighter globe.

2. Camera shake.

With the extension tube attached to the camera in full, there is a lot of weight in front of the camera and it doesn’t balance well on my cheap wobbly tripod. I noticed that even after depressing the shutter with a 2 sec lag, the camera was still shaking about. To overcome this, I upped the lag to 10 seconds. This helped. Focusing was also a little difficult due to teh wobbling, and the slackness in the focusing ring on my 18-55mm Canon lens. It isn’t the greatest lens in the world I must point out, but I can’t afford a fancy one.

3. Subject.

What to shoot? What looks interesting in close-up? I wanted something shiny, but the light was an issue. And it was late so I didn’t want to rummage around in everything. So in the end, I came across some matchsticks. Not overwhelmingly interesting, but my subject of choice for today.

Processing doen through UFRaw and GIMP. Would explain more about it, but this post is already miles too long. If you really really want to know, message me.

Leave a Comment

too wet to go out {51/365}

February 21, 2010 at 7:27 pm (February, Landscape & Outdoors, photoblog, urban landscape)
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

to wet to go out {51/365}

Rain was supposed to clear out today…an obvious error by the meteorologists…

This park is just behind my house, and has been a flooded pool of water for weeks now. I finally braved the mozzies, wet grass, and stupid barking neighbourhood dogs to go take a picture. (note: dogs can’t get out to eat me, they’re just annoying barking canines).

I took a little inspiration from The Cat in the Hat for my title today. I thought it most appropriate.

This shot wasn’t entirely wonderful in it’s composition, and needed a little something extra in processing. Thus, I added a texture. The RAW image was processed through UFRaw, with small adjustments to saturation, exposure and white balance.

In GIMP, I added a duplicate layer after doing an auto-levels adjustment. The duplicate layer was set to soft light (which seems to be a staple of mine these days). It helps with contrast and detail in nearly all of my pictures. Ok, the wonderful layer was found in the Flickr group Textures for Layers, and was made by pareeerica. It was set to Multiply (as opposed to soft light) at 60% opacity.

1 Comment

rain drops keep fallin’ on my head {50/365}

February 21, 2010 at 7:11 pm (bokeh, February, Landscape & Outdoors)
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

raindrops keep fallin' on my head {50/365}

Rain rain rain….and more rain. Everything is damp and thinking about going all mouldy! Not pleasant. Today’s photo is once again ‘un’-inspired by the weather.

I FINALLY got Digikam going – hooray! So I was able to read my camera card through linux. Yippee!

Today’s processing was done with UFRaw and GIMP. In UFRaw, I adjusted the white balance to Cloudy and added a touch of Saturation, and a little more exposure.

In GIMP, I did a lot more. I made a duplicate layer and made it soft light. In curves, I adjusted the Value graph to the lower side to darken the layer, which in turn added a lot more contrast to the image. I wanted the dark dreary feel today. I couldn’t get much detail into the highlights on the raindrops due to my added exposure in UFRaw. This was a little disappointing, and was also another reason I added greater contrast via Curves and layers.

1 Comment

rain drops…again! {49/365}

February 19, 2010 at 7:32 pm (Black & White, bokeh, February, Landscape & Outdoors, photoblog)

rain drops...again! {49/365}

Still playing catch-up.

Well…it’s been raining and raining and raining and…I think you get the picture. So, my inspiration is rain! I’m sure I could find a lot more interesting things to take pictures of besides rain drops on plants, however, I’m not brave enough to face the mosquito plague swarming around outside the lovely protective fly screen. Having said that, this photo is obviously a picture taken outside. My method….set the camera up before dashing like a sprinter to the already identified rain drop, snapping away like a crazy thing for a few milli-seconds, then I ran, jumped, skipped, flew, flapped and spun to evade the mozzies blocking my path back to relative safety.

See the post from day 48/365 about my explanation of why this photo was processed in Lightroom, which it was. Again, this is part of a series of catch-up photoblogging photos, so processing was quick and nasty. Well, maybe not nasty, but I didn’t really get to jot down my methods.

Leave a Comment

« Older entries

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.