ISO 400 46mm f/8 1/160sec
Added to One Word Sunday, List.
Tag Archives: One Word Sunday
Wordless Wednesday: St Mary the Virgin, Fen Ditton
ISO 160 4.3mm f/8.0 1/200sec
St. Mary the Virgin in Fen Ditton.
A part of Wordless Wednesday and One Word Sunday, Blue.
Daffodil Variation from Color to Monochrome
The daffodil is my favorite flower:
ISO 2500 50mm f/11 1/100sec
Here devoid of color not texture:
ISO 2500 50mm f/11 1/100sec
Tell me your favorite, comment below.
Cheers!
Picfair version is here in black and white and here in color.
Added to One Word Sunday, Monochrome, Cee’s Flower of the Day, and Six-Word Saturday.
In the Harbor
What can I tell you about this scene? Not a lot. It was taken in the harbor near Valletta in Malta. It’s a photo of three boats. I’m not even completely sure why I took the photo:
ISO 160 22mm f/22 1/60sec
So that’s not completely true, the scene appealed to me, I liked all the blues and the greys. I liked the uniform appearance of the boats. When I went to edit it, I went for a vintage looked. I darkened the sky and boosted the green tones:
ISO 160 22mm f/22 1/60sec
What will I do with this image? I don’t know, beyond keeping it just because I like it. What do you think of the edit? Do you sometimes keep images that you just like even if they have no other real use? Feel free to leave a comment below.
Cheers!
Added to Travel with Intent, Threesome.
Giant
One of the fun things about having a wide angle lens is that I can create photos that make an object seem like it dominates the landscape:
ISO 500 13mm f/16 1/800sec
I’ve done several things to make the windmill feel larger than it is, but before I get to that, here is the original file:
ISO 500 13mm f/16 1/800sec
Since there are several edits here, I’m going to write about them in the order that I applied them. I started with a crop. Cropping is one of those edits that photographers like to argue about a lot discuss. Should you crop first thing or leave it till the end? As with many points of contention regarding photography, the answer is yes, you should do one of those things. I tend to consider it on a photo by photo basis. In this case, the crop came first. There were too many people if this image was to be one that was just about the windmill. The crop would be an easy way to remove some of them. I applied the rule of thirds to my crop, placing the center of the mill blades on the upper right meeting point of the grid. The rest of the people were dispatched with the healing brush in Photoshop. Because the sky was fairly evenly blue, the dust spots I have on my camera sensor were also obvious. The healing brush took care of those as well.
The next step was to work with the tone curve in Lightroom. I actually wanted to move the point curve within the tone curve, because I knew I could create a more matte look to the photo by doing that. I just wasn’t sure where the button was for that in Lightroom, so I found this short article with the answer, it’s one of those simple but powerful things that Lightroom is capable of, once you find the right button!
From there I opened the split-toning panel and began to experiment. I have warmed the highlights of the image using that panel. I think that gives the final photo the bit of pop that it needed. I thought to use split-toning because over the weekend I read this article about it. The article is a good starting point I think, for understanding how split-toning works. Thanks to Lisa over at One Ocean at a Time for sending me the article last week as part of a discussion we were having about photo editing. If you are in the market for a blog that is full of the beauty of the world, hers is a good place to find that.
The last steps in my edits included adding some grain and a vignette. While I often sharpen my images near the end of the editing process, in this case, I chose to leave that step off.
What do you think of my edits? Feel free to leave a comment below.
Cheers!
Added to Travel with Intent: Giant.
Seals
Although my 70-200mm lens in a bit heavy, there are several reasons why I love it. One is the opportunity to get a close shot of nature with minimum disruption to my wild subjects, in this case, the seals near Blakeney Point. There are two types of seals in the area, this first photo is of a Grey Seal:
ISO 1250 195mm f/16 1/500 sec
Here is the original shot.
ISO 1250 195mm f/16 1/500 sec
This next photo is of the Common Seal:
ISO 1250 170mm f/16 1/640sec
Here is the original of that shot:
ISO 1250 170mm f/16 1/640sec
These photos were taken from a boat and my lens was set at 195mm and 170mm for the photos. In addition to having a long lens another trick to making the seals look closer than they were is to crop the images. In the case of the first photo, the crop is fairly small. I didn’t want to lose the shore or too much of the water as I thought they were important parts of the photo. I was more aggressive with the second photo in a couple of ways. The first is the crop, I’ve removed the blood-streaked seal completely. Secondly, I have changed the tone of the photo completely. While I warmed the first photo a bit, for this second one I wanted to change it completely, make it look like I had taken the shot in completely different light conditions. It’s a different look, but you still can tell how well these seals blend with their surroundings.
What do you think of my photos and their edits? Do you have a favorite? Feel free to leave a comment below.
A variation of that first image made it into my Instagram feed:
Picfair: Grey Seal and Common Seal
Added to Travel With Intent: Afar and Thursday Special: Marine.
Cheers!
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