Weekly Photo Challenge: Names

There are some times when a name just doesn’t seem to fit.  This pub is in York:

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The name struck me as ironic, since it looked like an inviting place, hardly a hole in the wall.  Here is the original photo:

ISO 400 50mm f/11 1/125

When I went to edit it, I was thinking more of accenting the sepia tones including the golden tones that were in the sign, as opposed to an actual representation of the building.  My edits here include a crop.  That is where I started; I used the straighten feature in Photoshop. It’s a subtle straighten in that I just did it by looking and deciding what was straight enough rather than using a grid.  I’ve used the Nik analog pro plug-in to help achieve the photographic look.  Once I had applied that filter, I switched to Lightroom.  From there I increased the saturation and luminance of the oranges and yellows.  I added a vignette and a bit of a haze.

What do you think of my interpretation of the building? It was a bit of a cold day, so the warm tones caught my attention.  Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!

Weekly Photo Challenge: H2O

I love having flowers in the house. These however, had seen better days:

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No amount of new water in the vase was going to bring them back, but I still thought they would make a beautiful photo.  This version was created using the Nik collection, which is a set of plug-ins that are compatible with Adobe editing products. I was pretty excited to find out that the collection is now free. The collection is, in its simplest form, a bunch of presets to choose from, just click and add.  As much as I love presets, I do tend to look at them as a way to start and then I edit from there.  Because I have found a lot of good things come from asking a simple question, I’d like to share that I found out that the Nik collection is free because of a question I asked Jane Lurie about a photograph she had created. She was nice enough to share how she had edited and passed along the tip about the collection.  If you have a moment to stop by her blog, I would recommend it, she does lovely work.

Having created my black and white version a few days ago, I sat down to write this blog post and was again looking at the color version of the photo:

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I’ll be honest, I’m now not sure which I like better.  I am thinking now of going back and working with the color version a bit more to see if I can come up with something that I really like.  For now, the black and white version is available in my Picfair portfolio.

Do you have a preference of the black and white or color version? Have you ever asked a simple question only to have a whole new world opened up to you?  Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!