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!

This Project is Complete, On to the Next One

The last time I wrote about my Pictorialism project in Photoshop class, I was trying to decide which prints to turn in.  I decided on six of them, and of those six, four were chosen to be put on display in the hallway at school.  Of those two, two of them are portraits of my children, so I won’t be posting them here. The two others, you have seen on this blog as they were being created, and here they are on the wall:

ISO 400 4mm 0ev f/2.7 1/30

ISO 400 4mm 0ev f/2.7 1/30

I first wrote about the bird here.  The version that you see above had an additional step before I printed that I had not written about in that post.  I added another layer in Photoshop. Basically I duplicated the file and changed the blending mode to multiply which made the print darker.  I thought this was necessary because the original print turned out to yellow in my opinion.

The tree I wrote about in a post where I showed a few different versions.  The blue version that is on the wall is also a darker version of what I had originally shown.  I decided I really wanted a deeper shade of blue and so I used a levels adjustment to make it darker, and I also darkened the edges of the photo.

So, this project is complete, come full circle, you might even say.  I’m started now on my next project which is food photography.  I’m sure I’ll be posting about it in the coming weeks.

I know it’s not a major exhibit, but it is always fun to see your work on display don’t you think?

Cheers!