Made with Luminar: Memory

Decorating for Christmas was in full swing this past week. A favourite ornament of mine is this one that was a gift from my Mom:

ISO 800 f/8 1/13sec 55mm

For this edit, I was going for a nostalgic feel, something that film and vintage filters tend to express. In this case, the filter is called “vintage film” and was a good starting point:

ISO 800 f/8 1/13sec 55mm

Luminar Look applied, Vintage Film set at 78%.

The Made with Luminar Series

This image is part of a project I am calling Made with Luminar. What the images in this series have in common is the software used to edit them, Luminar 3. As with my usual blog posts particulars of the camera settings can be found in the caption below the image. I’ll then explain what other filters and edits have been applied, often mentioning what layer and therefore order that they were applied. The text of these posts includes any Luminar “Looks” that have been applied to the photo. Each look is a series of presets that are applied to the photo. Where applicable I will mention what changes I have made to any of the looks. A full explanation of looks is available here on their website, https://skylum.com/luminar/user-guides/chapter-14-working-with-luminar-looks

You can assume basic edits have been applied. My most common edits are cropping, detail enhancement, and vignette. Specific questions or thoughts on the image are welcome in the comment section below.

Cheers!

Added to Lens-Artists Challenge, Nostalgic.

Touch of Red

When I sit down to edit an image it’s true to say that I’m not always sure what I will do with my final version.  Here is the original file of such an image:

ISO 1250 15mm f/11 1/40sec

Editing this image started with a crop. Since it was the little red ribbons that caught my attention on site, my next edit was to give them a saturation boost. I’ve desaturated some of the colors in this image. I then put a radial filter around the angel and sheep and made the rest of the image softer by moving the dehaze slider into negative numbers in the area outside of the filter. Here is the final image:

ISO 1250 15mm f/11 1/40sec

Like several images from my time in Prague, I don’t have a real use for it so to speak. However, I really like many of my images. They are a reminder of how much I enjoyed looking around the city. Prague is beautiful in my opinion. I will keep this image, as I have kept others, just because they make me happy. Sometimes, it’s the little things, like little red ribbons, that catch my eye. It appeared that someone had taken the time to hand tie them in, and that lovely small detail really what made this display beautiful.  Do you often keep images for no other reason than they make you happy? Do you like the edits I have done here?  Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!

Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge, Red, and Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, Small is Beautiful.

Aromatic

I attended a Christmas fair this weekend and my youngest brought this home:

View this post on Instagram

A little bit of #beauty for your day #photography

A post shared by Amy Maranto (@marantophotography) on Nov 20, 2016 at 4:26am PST

In addition to being beautiful it is incredibly aromatic.

So, my fingers are crossed that this post shows the photo that I posted to my Instagram.  I started posting there last week, so stop by and say hi if you are on that platform.

The smells that are associated with the Christmas season are one of the things that I love about it.  It was nice to go and get a little preview this weekend.  I’ll be honest though, I’m one of those people who doesn’t like to attend a bunch of Christmas activities, I’ll go to a few and that will be good enough for me.  How about you, do attend many holiday events, or are you more likely to lay low? Are you on Instagram, how do you like that platform?  Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!

 

Weekly Photo Challenge: Circle

Part of Christmas is putting everything away.  I’ll admit, we are doing that a bit early this year, before the end of the Christmas season on the Church calendar.  This year, our packing up is a bit more involved.  We will be moving this coming year, so we are sorting though everything, and deciding what to keep, what to get rid of, and what is going into storage.  Since we are moving from the US to England, all our lights are going into storage.  That’s easy.  Harder is sorting through the decorations.  Or at least I thought it would be hard.  It turns out my kids thought it was fun.  Also, I drug out my camera to take some photos, and that is always fun.  Here is an ornament that will be coming with us:

ISO 3200 50mm 0ev f.3.5 1/30

To shoot this photo, I used a magnifying, close-up lens on my 50mm lens. I lined Santa up so that the light would be smooth and luminous behind him.  Here is the original photo:

ISO 3200 50mm 0ev f.3.5 1/30

I cropped the photo and applied a vintage filter in Aperture:

ISO 3200 50mm 0ev f.3.5 1/30

I liked the vintage feel, but thought it was too strong.  So to get the final version I started this post with, I opened the image in Photoshop and then duplicated it.  One layer I made into a black and white version, that was the top layer.  Then I dropped the opacity of that layer to about 50%.  I then made a mask on that layer and masked in the santa figure. The result was the more toned down vintage feel in the background.  That, to me, is more appealing.  What do you think? Feel free to leave a comment below.

A version of this image is available on Picfair.

Happy New Year to all my readers and visitors.  This year will be a busy one in my household as we relocate. It is a cycle that we are use to, we move every few years for work reasons.  To me, it often seems like a circle, we move, get set-up, get situated, get ready to move again.  In a way this cycle feels like the smaller yearly cycle of celebrating Christmas.

Cheers!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Now

I was taking some photos of our Christmas tree and processing them in Aperture just for fun so:

ISO 800 4mm 0ev f/2.7 1/20

to you and yours!  This photo was taken with my point and shoot on the macro setting and then in Aperture I applied the vintage setting.  But that was yesterday, this week’s photo challenge is all about now.  So this is me this morning:

ISO 80 4mm f/2.8 1/24

There I am reflected in the screen on my computer as I take a photo with my phone.  This photo was edited in Aperture and a sepia low tone effect added.  How is this now? It’s me sitting at my desk thinking about the technical issues I am having with my technology and wondering how I am going to fix it all in the coming weeks.  It’s a work in progress and what I am working on right now.  It’s a lot to sort out but since it is important to me, I’m sure I will come up with something.

A very Merry Christmas, happy holidays to all of you.  Thanks for stopping by, feel free to leave a comment below, maybe even a line about what big projects are on your plate right now.

Cheers!

Merry Christmas

Every year I take some pictures of our tree.  Tonight I was photographing this ornament that was a gift and is a new addition to our tree:

ISO 400 50mm 0ev f/2.5 0.4 sec

For this shot I choose a f-stop of 2.5 because I wanted the snowflake to be sharp but the pine needles to be a bit soft.  I used a tripod so that I could take multiple shots that would be exactly the same except for the shutter speed.  I then picked three of the photos and created an HDR image using Photomatix.  I used the “natural” setting because with this photo I am just trying to show detail and leaving it at that.  Thoughts or comments? feel free to leave them below.

This post was written in part as a response to the Weekly Photo Challenge the theme of which is one.

I would like to wish each of you a Merry Christmas, all the best to you.

Cheers!

Business Cards

For Christmas I got a set of business cards.  In the box my oldest included some homemade versions of my cards.

I thought they were pretty creative!

Cheers!

Christmas Tree Bokeh

I was having some fun with bokeh again.  A few days ago I blogged about it with some hints on how to achieve the effect, you can check that out here if you like.  This is another image that I took:

ISO 400 50mm 0ev f/1.8 1/30

What I liked about this image was the texture of the ornament competing with the texture of the lights.

Happy Boxing Day!

Cheers!

Travel Theme: Festive

Since festive is the theme this week at Where’s my backpack? I decided to give the whole bokeh thing a try.  Here is one of my photographs that I took last night:

ISO 1000 50mm 0ev f/1.8 1/80

For those of you who are not familiar with the term bokeh, in this photo it is the dots of light that the tree lights and tinsel have become in this image.  In order to get this photo, I first read this article that is on the Digital Photography School website.  If you ever have a basic question about photography, I think the DPS website is a good place to start.  What I liked about the bokeh article is that it includes specific examples of bokeh with each of those photos linked to the flickr image.  Flickr (the link there is specifically for bokeh) is a good place to look at images because the camera settings are often included in information, which gives you an idea of where to start when making your images.

For my photo above, I used a tripod.  By setting my f-stop to 1.8 it was easy to have just the bird in focus, thus creating the bokeh effect with the lights an tinsel.  This was a fun image to make, and I will be working on some more while we have our tree up.

Cheers!

Christmas lights, with rain

It was a bit rainy here over the weekend.  I enjoy catching photos of raindrops, so I went looking for this photo, a raindrop on our Christmas lights.

ISO 200 50mm 3 exposures f/9 1/25

I used my tripod because even though the bush wasn’t going anywhere it was a bit breezy and I knew I was going to try a bracketed exposure to make an HDR image.  For this image the exposures were (-1.67, -2.67, -.67)  I set the exposure dark because it was hazy out, so there was a lot of light.

I then used Photomatix to make my HDR image. I picked a version that I thought brought out some of the rich color tones that were there.  I put the image back into Aperture for some final tweaking.  I cropped and sharpened the image a bit.  I also made the top right corner a bit darker.

I’d like your opinion, would you buy a card or print of an image like this? or does the combination of rain and Christmas not appeal to you at all?  Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!