February 21, 2010 at 7:27 pm (February, Landscape & Outdoors, photoblog, urban landscape)
Tags: 365, digikam, GIMP, outdoor, photo, project 365, summer daze, texture, ufraw, urban, urban landscape, water
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.
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February 17, 2010 at 1:14 pm (February, photoblog, urban landscape)
Well…Monday was a bad one for my photoblog. I completely forgot to take a photo with my nice fancy camera, instead, only capturing something with my terrible phone camera. In my defence, I was busy with the kids all day, then dashed out to do some grocery shopping once my husband got home before driving 40mins into town to play squash…after melting in the 96% humidity and having to drive back home again, my mind was completely blank and void of creative spark.
Ok, back to the photo. Using GIMP, I did a level adjustment, added a layer which I set at Soft Light. Then I played with the curves on the new layer. I must also mention, I had to use the clone tool to get rid of some marks that were on the windshield (I took the photo inside the car).
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February 14, 2010 at 9:32 pm (Black & White, February, Landscape & Outdoors, photoblog, urban landscape)
Visited the family today, they have a shack aka studio that was very photogenic. The photo today lent itself to sepia and texture work. Processing the RAW image through Lightroom (no choice today….long story) – and I added the texture layer in GIMP.
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January 30, 2010 at 8:27 pm (January, Landscape & Outdoors, night & long exposure, urban landscape)
Tags: 365, beach, coast, landscape, long exposure, photography, project 365, seascape, summer daze, urban landscape
What a disaster!! Almost in any case, at least I got a worthy image. I went in search of a reflection shot, choosing to take one off a beach that faces our main beach/CBD. It was raining. I remembered the umbrella! The only thing that went right. Once I got onto the beach, the umbrella was hard to control because of the gale force wind (slight exaggeration…I admit). I started to set up my shot, when I realised a VITAL component of my tripod had been removed by my VERY PESKY 2 year old. I didn’t even notice it was gone. I also admit to much muttering under my breath at this point. Somehow I managed to ‘dangle’ the camera off to one side of the tripod where it remained faithfully still and free of wet sand. Due to all the distractions, I completely forgot checking white balance settings and DoF. But at least a shot worked. I’m surprised at how good it actually was. Considering all the chaos, and the lovely smudge that ended up on the lens because of rain.
No post-processing again today.
Lesson – CHECK YOUR GEAR!
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January 17, 2010 at 8:11 pm (January, Landscape & Outdoors, urban landscape)
Tags: 365, brick, monochrome, perspective, photography, project 365, summer daze, urban landscape, wall
I went to a spot similar to yesterday’s photo, however, this time I visited it during the day, instead of a more unnerving twilight. This old alley-way intrigued me when I went down it many months before. I always wanted to come back and take a photo. For interests sake, the main wall in the photo houses Subway on the inside. And a bakery resides behind the wall on the left.
I thought this photo may have been better if the great big Norfolk(?) Pine wasn’t seemingly growing out of the Subway wall…
Lessons – again I went in, took a few very quick snaps and scuttled off home (I had to return for feral hour…another story). I’d like to take my time some day and scope the site before shooting photos.
I’ve processed this image with a Digikam, UFRaw and GIMP work flow.
I did a bit of manipulation at the RAW stage. I adjusted the White Balance to Daylight, adjusted the exposure, gamma, contrast and saturation. In GIMP, I duplicated the background layer (something I do nearly every time I use GIMP). Then I did an level adjustment, bringing the slider in from the left as it was lacking pixels in this range. I duplicated this layer again and desaturated it with a bias to luminosity (made it B&W). After this, I mucked around with the colour balance for highlights, mid-tones and shadows. I did very little adjustment, but it made a difference to the picture. In this case, if I moved one slider tot he left a little, I’d move a different slider to the right a similar amount. I’m not sure this means they cancels out each other…I didn’t notice if it did. Must pay more attention next time!!
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January 16, 2010 at 8:16 pm (January, night & long exposure, urban landscape)
Tags: 365, long exposure, night, photography, project 365, summer daze, urban
Ok, today was one of those days where inspiration went on a holiday, leaving me with a shell devoid of creativity. How depressing!! I guess these days will happen….especially because I ran around a the last minute trying to find a worthy shot. Forward planning seems to be one of those things I fail to recognise! Oops.
Lesson – stop running around like a nutty chook and think before dashing off to take a photo.
Oh, about the image. It’s an image of a half-abandoned building. One side has some lovely shops in it, the other, a hollow shell of boarded windows out front, and broken ones around the back. Funny thing is, this building is in the CBD of my relatively bustling town – I find that bizarre!
Ok, I’m adding the processing recipe today. I utilised Digikam, UFRaw and the GIMP – all open-source software choices.
I use Digikam to import the photos into an album on my computer. In UFRaw (which sensibly enough, handles RAW images), I decided to automate a bunch of stuff, including Contrast Curve, Exposure and White Balance. From there, into GIMP I go. All I did here was an Auto Levels adjustment and voila! Image done.
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January 11, 2010 at 2:50 pm (January, urban landscape)
Tags: 365, challenge, photo, photography, summer daze, urban landscape
Ok – another stab at using photoshop. I had to remove a sun glare spot which I thought detracted from the photo. Also, there was once a lightpole at the end of the fence.
For this and yesterday’s shot I used Lightroom to RAW process (a program I like when compared to Bibble and UFRaw). For info’s sake, UFRaw is open source for the linux platform, and it requires a little more insight into the RAW world to use effectively I think. Therefore I place the fault on my shoulders for not being happy with it. I’m in the process of reading Bruce Fraser’s Real World Camera RAW book to upgrade my knowledge.
Ok, lessons – get smart!
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January 7, 2010 at 6:42 pm (January, urban landscape)
Tags: 365, challenge, photo, photography, summer daze, urban landscape
Ok – here’s my first effort at adding a texture layer to a photo. Many thanks to rubyblossom.. for the texture. I’m personally impressed with the results. I shot some pictures down at a local creek that has a bunch of old fishing shacks and private jetty’s. It’s an interesting place and I plan to return.
Lessons for today – take mozzie spray! I got eaten alive. Also, I need to be a more confident photographer as I felt like a goose taking photos with people looking at me quizzically.
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