Well that was Fun

There were a few things I had in mind when I sat down yesterday to work on an editing project in Luminar.  The first was that it was Halloween, so I had to pick an appropriate file to work on:

ISO 800 50mm f/16 1/100sec

The second was that it was Halloween (sounds a bit like the first thing) but that meant picking an appropriate filter:

ISO 800 50mm f/16 1/100sec

Luminar had released some free Halloween presets, so I used “Darklord” for this photo. But what I really wanted to work on was creating a watermark that I could use in Luminar. Up until now I have been exporting my files to this blog from Lightroom and applying the watermark at that point. Luminar is promising to release a library feature soon and I am hoping that will mean I can ditch Lightroom, but I do like to have a watermark. I e-mailed Luminar and they sent me a link to a page that contains directions for making a watermark; scroll down on that page, the directions are there I promise. The results are on the second photo, the first photo has my Lightroom watermark on it.

It was a fun little project that didn’t take too long to complete. I’m thinking it’s fine as a starting point, but I may go back and tweak it a bit. What do you think of it? I’m open to suggestions in the comments below. How do you like the Halloween look to the edit of the photo? How was your Halloween? Feel free to comment below.

Cheers!

Added to Lens-Artists Weekly Photo Challenge, Just for Fun.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Descent

When I saw this statue last week, I was amused by the pumpkin decoration for Halloween, but what I was really interested in capturing was the water:

ISO 800 80mm 0ev f/13 1/80

I had used an f-stop of 13 to capture as much detail in the scene as possible.  That ended up being a mistake because in the original, which I will put at the bottom of this post, there is too much detail in the grasses behind the elephant.  I chose a shutter speed of 80 because I wanted some of the water to be frozen and some of it to still be in motion. That speed and the harsh light helps the water stand out in this photo.

The background I never managed to completely solve, but I did take some steps which I think helped.  A fiddled around quite a bit in Photoshop, but for the version above here is what I have done.  First I cropped the image and sharpened it a bit.  Then I converted it to black and white.  In honor of Halloween, I masked the orange of the pumpkin back in. That orange seemed a bit too cartoonish with the black and white.  So I then put a photo filter layer on it, using the sepia setting. The pumpkin still sticks out because sepia and orange are not the same, but that combination is less jarring.

Here is the original:

ISO 800 80mm 0ev f/13 1/80

So this week’s theme was descent.  I was originally thinking of the descent of the water, but it could also be a descent into the madness of Photoshop.  Let me know what you think of my created image in the comments below.

Cheers and Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween

Just for fun, here are some pictures of me from a Halloween run I did a few weekends ago.  I ran 10K in this get-up:

ISO 400 4mm 0ev f/2.7 1/15

What else could I do when my race number just happened to be 1776?

ISO 1000 4mm 0ev f/2.7 1/20

My daughter tells me it is illegal to post these photos without saying that Daddy took it.  So, photo credit to “Daddy” for these pictures.

Cheers!

 

 

Travel Theme: Spooky

I could not pass up this week’s theme, spooky.  A lot of pre-Halloween fun going on over at Where’s my backpack, so I thought I would join in.  This past week in my Digital Photography class we have been working on night photography so a bunch of my posts in the near future will have that as a theme.  Here is my spooky night photo taken this past week:

ISO 160 f/18 18s 0ev 50mm

It was lurking in my front garden! This photo was taken at 6:13am using a tripod, flashlight, and laser pointer.

Cheers!