This is a photo for one of those days:
ISO 25 f/2.2 4.15mm 1/40 sec
The kind where you really have to stretch for natural light, because winter is just like that sometimes:
ISO 25 f/2.2 4.15mm 1/40 sec
I often enjoy editing simple photos like this in Hipstamatic. The one has the Florence Lens and Ina’s 1982 film filters added.
The Instagram version is here:
Added to Day 21 of January Squares and Cee’s Flower of the Day.
Cheers!
No, I didn’t need another one,
but gee, Hipstamatic sure is fun!
Cheers!
Added to Tuesday Photo Challenge, Rose and Six Word Saturday.
This could have been taken in a lot of gardens since I often see roses trained to grow up or through artificial objects, but this was taken at Giverny in Claude Monet’s gardens. I couldn’t help but think while I was visiting that there were a lot of plants you could see anywhere in this garden, yet the way they are assembled makes them unique to this particular garden. Here are some roses growing on a fence:
ISO 800 50mm f/13 1/60
It’s a nice image as shot, but I wanted to edit it in a few small ways. First was the crop. This eliminated two things. First is the petals that are partially in the top center of the photo and the leaves in the middle right-hand side. It also makes the branch less prominent. In addition to the crops, a few adjustments to the tone curve makes the grid of the fence more obvious as compared to this original shot:
ISO 800 50mm f/13 1/60
This slight accent on the geometry of man and nature seemingly in harmony and the slightly cooler tones of the image, do a lot to settle this photo. To me it is calmer, but what do you think? Feel free to leave a comment below.
Cheers!
Added to Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge, Geometry.
I wrote a post about some roses that I had in the house a little over a week ago. Then I kept the flowers until well after their scent had faded. As you can imagine, it was so that I could get some photos. Here is one that I shot a few days ago:
ISO 800 50mm f/8.0 2.0 sec
What I was thinking about was light. I knew I wanted to shoot in the early morning light, to take advantage of that lovely tinge of the first light of the day. In this case, my tripod was mandatory, you see the exposure time of two seconds? there is no way for me to get a clear shot while holding the camera. So, with my camera set up on the tripod, I worked a bit with my f-stop. I wanted the roses to be fairly in focus, but I wanted the raindrops on the window behind to appear as bokeh. F/8 was the answer for this photo shoot.
So then to the editing, cropping was my first step. I then created a color version and this black and white version:
ISO 800 50mm f/8.0 2.0 sec
You can see that I have cropped out the left side of the photo, just a bit too much going on there in my opinion. The slightly warm tint to this version I got by sliding up the temperature slider in Lightroom. I’ve also added a bit of grain to this version.
With both a color and black and white version created, from Lightroom I opened them as layers in a single file in Photoshop. Here is the final version of that experiment:
ISO 800 50mm f/8.0 2.0 sec
To achieve this look, I have the black and white version as the top layer but I have lowered its opacity. I did trying adding a mask to add in more color to the roses, but ended up not liking the effect. The original color of the roses seemed garish against the more muted background of this combined version.
What do you think of my versions? I added both the black and white and the combined version to my portfolio on Picfair. I like them, does it bother you that the roses are not their original color? have you ever tried combining black and white and color photos? the result can be lovely or jarring, it is interesting how varied the outcomes can be.
Cheers!
There are a lot of flowers in the house right now. I enjoy all of them and love photographing them, but there is something about the rose that seems to embody grace:
ISO 800 50mm f/5.6 1/20
There is also something inherently graceful about a black and white photograph. I find that limiting the color palette is a form of simplicity even if it is not simple to do. In this case, I started with this original photo:
The original
Before converting it to black and white, I edited it to this version using Lightroom:
ISO 800 50mm f/5.6 1/20
I have increased the saturation, vibrance, and clarity. I like the original version better than this edited version, but it has been my experience that a crisp and vibrant color photo often transforms into a more interesting black and white version than a softer color photo does.
Having created the more dynamic color version, I then edited it using the Silver Efex Pro plug in within Lightroom. As I usually do, I began with choosing a filter that looked closest to what I wanted to achieve and then edited from there. It is rare that I apply a filter and then don’t edit it further. In this case this filter was a bit too dark for my liking, I increased the light by using the sliders for both the highlights and the shadows. Back in Lightroom, I added a vignette.
This photo was shot using my Canon 50D with a 50mm lens and a magnifier. This allows me to get more of a macro photo. The difficulty in using this set up though is getting adequate light. In this case I went with f/5.6 and 1/20 shutter speed. That’s a slow shutter speed, I got a lot of blurry images. Using the tripod would have made this easier.
The beautiful thing about flowers is that they are always changing. Here’s another photo, this time using my iPhone, taken this morning:
Lovely, but it is still the black and white version that says graceful to me. What do you think? Do you have a favorite version? Is there a flower that you think is more graceful than the rose? Do you have a favorite way to convert images to black and white? Feel free to leave a comment below.
Cheers!
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