Weekly Photo Challenge: (Let the Journey be the) Reward

Easy to say, let the journey be the reward, hard to do though in my opinion.  I had been rethinking the way I view my workday this week so in a strange way this challenge did tie into what I had been thinking about this week.  I have an hourly part-time job and then I have my own business which I am hoping to have up and running in the next few years.  It is easy to let the hourly job, with its short term reward of a paycheck, take precedence over my own business whose reward is more long term and harder to describe.

So, this week I started a timer to keep track of the hours I am putting into my business.  An attempt to remind myself that this job is as real as my paycheck job.  So far, I have found it helpful, so I am going to stick with it for awhile.  One of the things I was working on this week while I was on my new clock, was layers and textures.  As part of that I went out this morning and took some photos of leaves, dead and brown, in the hopes of using that image to create new ones.  So below is a description of what I was working on.

First here is the original leaf photo:

ISO 1000 50mm 0ev f/7.1 1/50

It’s a bit dark and needed some cropping.  This is a version that I edited into more of what I had in mind:

ISO 1000 50mm 0ev f/7.1 1/50

Then I decided to try combining it with another image.  Here is the image I chose:

ISO 800 75mm 0ev f/4.5 1/250

I then combined the two and created this final image:

ISO 800 75mm 0ev f/4.5 1/250

Is this image one that I will sell? Nope, but it is the technique that I will use in other images that I would.

In this case with the two images in Photoshop, I drug the leaves in as a layer below the owl image. Then I put a mask on the bird layer and using a paintbrush set at about 40% opacity, I painted the leaves faintly in.

What do you think of the technique? Is this something you have also tried? What to you is most rewarding in your artistic endeavors?  Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!

When Nature gives you a Pattern, Wear It

I recently finished a series of 10 images for a photography class I was taking.  All of the images are of birds.  Here is a Eurasian Eagle-Owl:

ISO 200 300mm 0ev f/5.6 1/200

The pattern of feathers help the owl blend in with its surroundings.

For this particular series of photos, I rented a 70-300mm lens.  I did also use a tripod for this image.  I used a bracketed exposure setting because I wanted to make an HDR image.  In this case I have three exposures, -1,0,1.  I used Photomatix to process the image into an HDR version.  Once the images were combined I used a “painterly” option that is available in Photomatix.  For this image I was interested in maintaining and highlighting the detail in the feathers.  After I was finished creating the HDR image I edited the photo in Photoshop.  I sharpened the image a bit by going to Filter-Other-High Pass.  In the layer panel, I chose blending mode “Hard Light”.  For my class I printed a 10×15 version that I matted.

Questions or comments about this image? Feel free to leave them below.

This post was written in response to the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge which this week has pattern as its theme.

Cheers!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Delicate

For this week’s photo challenge from WordPress I picked photos of the Eurasian Eagle Owl to represent the theme delicate.  Despite being one of the larger owls, it’s individual feathers are quite delicate.  I found one on the path at World Bird Sanctuary and took the photo just to show how delicate it is.  If you click on that photo you can see the wood chips through the feather in several places.  I have included a couple of pictures of the owl too, just to give you a feel for its size and beauty, if you are not familiar with this particular bird. Just for your information it is against US Federal Law to possess feathers (and the like) of birds of prey.  If you see the feather, take a picture, not the feather 🙂

ISO 160 95mm 0.33 f/5.6 1/25

ISO 160 95mm 0.33ev f/5.6 1/25

ISO 160 95mm 0.33ev f/5.6 1/25

Cheers!