Weekly Photo Challenge: Inspiration

When it comes to inspiration for my photography, I just go outside.  I love taking nature images and this past week, I was away for a few days camping by a river.  Close to our campsite was a garden full of butterflies, here is one:

ISO 400 190mm 0ev f/10 1/250

This is the edited version, I’ll show you the original in a bit.  For this photo I chose an ISO of 400 because even though it was sunny, the garden itself was full of harsh shadows. I picked an f-stop of f/10 because I wanted most of the image in focus, but I was OK with some of the background detail fading away. A shutter speed of 250 seemed to be fine to catch the movement of the butterfly.  In editing this photo, I first cropped and sharpened it.  I then made a layer with a gradient map that was yellow, but dropped that layer’s opacity to about 70%. That was the top layer; I also put a mask on it and masked back in the original flower and butterfly.  The result created some contrast between the two layers. I then decided to use the oil paint filter to give the photo a bit of a dreamy look.  Here is the original:

ISO 400 190mm 0ev f/10 1/250

So what do you think of my two versions? Feel free to leave a comment below.

On another note, what do you do when things go seriously awry? One of my favorite bloggers and certainly my favorite dinosaur, just got out of prison.  She’s going to use her experience to help other women who have been incarcerated.  To me, that’s brave and inspiring, read her thoughts on it here.

Going Outside?

I knew I was going to have to go outside, despite the snow and freezing rain.  But before I did that this morning I set up my camera in a window by the bird feeders.  Here is one of my visitors:

ISO 640 50mm 0ev f/9 1/250

In order to get this shot I am using my tripod and remote shutter.  That way my camera can be close to the window to eliminate glare, but I am not there scaring away the birds.  I used the live view function on my camera which allowed me to see what I was going to take a photo of.  In this case I have also increased my ISO because despite the light of the snow, it was a bit dark.

Once I had this shot, I edited it in Photoshop.  I will show you the original at the bottom of this post, but I started my editing in Bridge and used Camera Raw to adjust the exposure and clarity.  Then I opened the photo in Photoshop and did a levels adjustment and some sharpening.  I also cropped the image. Here is the original:

ISO 640 50mm 0ev f/9 1/250

As you can see from the snowflakes on the bird, it was actively snowing.  It stopped shortly after so off I went to clear the walk. Hope you are warm wherever you are!

Cheers!

This post was written in response to Daily Prompt: The Outsiders.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Future Tense

You know how some weeks are kind of long? This week was that way for me.  Not that it was a bad week, it was just a very full week.  So, when I saw that this week’s photo challenge at WordPress was future tense, I thought I would show you what I was looking forward to all week:

ISO 800 50mm 0ev f/4.5 1/500

I was really looking forward to being outside for awhile this week. I stopped at Lone Elk Park which is a State Park in Missouri.  These elk were pretty close to the road, so I actually stayed in my car so I wouldn’t startle them.

The prompt at WordPress also indicated that since it was still phoneography month, I should also take some pictures with my phone.  So I did. Definitely one those times where the camera phone just isn’t enough:

ISO 80 4mm f/2.8 1/120

ISO 80 4mm f/2.8 1/120

Also, I’m wondering if phoneography can really count as a “month” if it doesn’t appear in spell check?

Cheers!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Happy

ISO 100 f/20 1/8 28mm

I was happy to a) be outside on a beautiful day and b) have my camera with me so this photo is my response to the WordPress weekly photo challenge.

Cheers!