Weekly Photo Challenge: Beneath Your Feet

On an overcast day this past week I was able to get some bird shots that featured reflections:

ISO 2000 70mm 0ev f/7.1 1/15

This Cattle Egret has an almost identical replica of itself right beneath its feet.  The somewhat dark, overcast morning allowed for some vivid reflections.  It did mean however that I had to raise my ISO and lower my shutter speed to attempt to get the photo I was after.  This bird paused for a moment, so I was able to get the shot.  I have plenty of other shots that will be headed straight to the trash bin.  As far as editing, I stuck some pretty basic moves, I cropped the photo, increased the temperature rating in Camera Raw to warm it up a bit, and sharpened it.  Here is the original:

ISO 2000 70mm 0ev f/7.1 1/15

I think the edits make for a more compelling photo, what do you think?  Feel free to comment below.

Cheers!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Half and Half

I was up early this morning taking photos of my wildflowers when it occurred to me that perhaps I did have an entry for this week’s photo challenge, half and half.  As much I love taking photos of just the flowers, the photos tend to be more interesting with their other half, bees:

ISO 800 150mm 0ev f/7.1 1/160

In this case, just a single bee.  He was the only one out this morning.  When I edited this photo, I did something I don’t usually do, I did a fair amount of the editing in Camera Raw before opening it up in Photoshop.  I used the sliders in Camera Raw to adjust the exposure, clarity, and highlights.  Then I opened it in Photoshop to crop and sharpen the image.  Here is the original shot:

ISO 800 150mm 0ev f/7.1 1/160

I think the image is a bit stronger with the edits.  With the bee almost dead center, it does break the “rule of thirds” photography rule.  In this case that doesn’t bother me. To be honest I think part of what I like about this photo, is the fact that I was up early enough before work to have the time to go and be outside in one of my favorite places.  Do you have a photo like that, one that is more about how you were feeling at the time and not so much about the photo itself?  What do you think of the edits?  Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!

Found In Nature

Signs of Spring, you can find them here if you are looking hard enough.  I’m on the lookout, so I have noticed the increased number of birds that I can see outside my kitchen window in the morning.  This little sparrow really likes the cover of a pile of sticks we are collecting from a recent storm:

ISO 1600 19mm 0ev f/5.6 1/100

I’ll show you the original in a moment but I decided to convert this image to black and white for Cee’s Black and White Photo Challenge: Found in Nature  I used my point and shoot to get this image. This little bird was pretty still, so I was pretty confident the camera would get a decent shot.

I opened the original in Camera Raw and increased the exposure and the clarity.  Then I converted it to black and white.  From there I opened it in Photoshop, cropped and sharpened it a bit.

Here is the original:

ISO 1600 19mm 0ev f/5.6 1/100

One of the reasons I cropped the photo was to make the bird look like it was in a more natural setting.  I also wanted to make him a little more obvious, since he gets lost a bit in the black and white.  What do you think?  Does black and white work here?

Cheers!

Seeing Red in RAW

Just yesterday I published a post where this climbing bag was the finished result:

ISO 800 50mm 0ev f/3.2 1/60

While I was working yesterday, I saw in my textbook that there was a way to desaturate an image selectively using Camera Raw.  It was a technique I had never tried before, so I thought I would give it a shot.

Here is my finished result:

ISO 800 50mm 0ev f/3.2 1/60

I found this pretty interesting, and there would be a lot of fun ways to edit using this technique.  It was very straightforward as well.  I opened the image in Camera Raw from Bridge.  From the original dialogue box I clicked open the HSL/Grayscale tab and made my adjustments.  Here is a screenshot of the settings that I used:

Here are the settings I used

I started with desaturating all the colors but red and then decided to boost the reds just for fun.

So what do you think of my red version?  What kind of photo do you think might work with this technique?  I am thinking a landscape or floral photo.

Cheers!

Change of Season

One of the things that I love about the change of seasons is the transition flowers go through.  I chose to photograph two wildflowers that are in the yard.  One looks like it is done for the season and the other hasn’t gotten the memo regarding the frost we have had.

ISO 160 50mm 0ev f/3.2 1/100

This is my flower that is done for the season.  When I was shooting this flower and the one you will see below I set my f-stop to 3.2 because that was enough to capture the detail of the flower and blur out the background.  Because the f-stop setting like that will let in a lot of light I used a high shutter speed and a low ISO to keep the images from being overexposed.  Both images were edited using Camera Raw.  I converted them both to greyscale and then applied some split toning.  For this first flower I have my color settings on blue but at a low saturation.  I felt like this helped convey the cold of the approaching season.

This flower, processed in a similar way but with different settings:

ISO 160 50mm f/3.2 1/100

Here I used a combination of yellow and orange and a high saturation.  I was hoping to convey the fading warmth that this flower is pretty successfully hanging on to.

This post was written in part as a response to Sonel’s Split-Toning Challenge.  Her theme for this week was change of season.  If you are interested in split-toning at all I would encourage you to visit her blog, she has a lot of helpful hints and she uses a variety of different programs to edit her images.

What do you think of my flowers? Kind of hard to believe they are right next to one another in the yard isn’t it?

Cheers!