Travel Theme: Fresh

For this week’s travel theme fresh I’m back in the classroom.  A freshly hatched chick:

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And outdoors with newly hatched robins:

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These photos were taken with different cameras.  The chicken photo was taken with my Canon 50D.  The lighting was quite dark but I wanted to give the photo a soft light look.  So the ISO is high, the f-stop is low, and the shutter speed is slow. The chick was resting it’s head on the shell and was being very still, so the slow shutter speed was not a problem.

The robin photo was taken with my point and shoot camera using the macro setting on the camera.  While I didn’t do any post editing on the chicken, the robin photo has been cropped and sharpened.

Cheers!

Travel Theme: Unexpected

Sometimes you forget to be a tourist in your own town.  Then maybe you get an unexpected reminder.  For me  the reminder was in the form of birthday cakes.  Specifically the Cakeway to the West, a celebration of the 250th birthday of St. Louis Missouri.  There are 250 of these 4ft. tall cakes scattered throughout the St. Louis region.  Here are snapshots of a few of them:

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Lone Elk Park

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World Bird Sanctuary

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St. Louis Art Museum

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Cahokia Mounds, which is in Illinois.

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Shakespeare Festival St. Louis

I have a bunch more to see obviously if I want to see all 250 of them!  It is a lot of fun to run into these cakes around town.  These photos I have taken with my point and shoot or iPhone. In Photoshop I did a levels adjustment on a few of them and then sharpened them a bit. Have you ever played the tourist in your own town?

Cheers!

Travel Theme: Metal

Cahokia Mounds, ever heard of it? It a UNESCO World Heritage site that is just outside of St. Louis Missouri.  Here is Monk’s Mound the largest remaining part of the site:

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Cahokia Mounds are the remains of a society that was living in the area in A.D. 700-1400.  At its peak there may have been as many as 20,000 people living in the area.  The modern stairs in the photo are on the site of stairs that would have been used when this older culture was flourishing.  When you climb to the top, you get a view of modern day St. Louis:

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The metallic glow of St. Louis is quite jarring in comparison.  Archeologists have found relatively little metal at the Cohokia site, just a few bits of copper.  Tools of bone and stone are much more common.  The site has a very nice interpretive center and if you go for a visit, that is where I would recommend you start.  It is interesting to look through what is known about the site and then think about all the things that aren’t known.

On the day we visited, I wasn’t really thrilled with the photos I was getting as I was looking on the back of my camera.  I decided to shoot bracketed exposures and edit them in Photomatix.  Once I was in Photomatix I decided to use a surreal setting for my final photos.  I wanted the stairs to pop in the first photo and the metallic glow and odd sky in the second photo.  I would say I was looking for a bit of drama to illustrate my story.  Below are two of the original photos, both the middle exposure I shot:

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I felt that the HDR and surreal settings help to illustrate between these two cultures.  What do you think? Does it make that point? Does it do it well, or is it too overdone for your liking?  Your comments are welcome below.

Cheers!

Travel Theme: Blossoms

I live in suburbia.  Over the years I’ve lived in several variations of suburbia.  Whichever variation of suburbia I am living in I like to put native plants and wildflowers in my gardens.  The native plants I put in over the last few years are struggling this season because we had a non-native winter, far colder than usual.  So are first spring flowers this year are not native plants but wildflowers.  I love photographing these blossoms as they appear in the yard. On this particular shoot, I took both of my cameras with me.  This first was taken with my Canon Powershot:

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This version was shot using the color picker setting in the camera. I selected purple and it changed the rest of the image to black and white.  I do wish the camera had picked up more of the purple.  I did love the way the light turned up in this image.  It was beautiful in that particular moment, and I think the camera honored that.  This image was edited in Photoshop, I cropped it and sharpened it.  Here is the original:

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This next flower I shot using my Canon 50D:

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I chose a very shallow depth of field to draw your attention to the front blossom and deal with the very busy background by blurring it.  This photo has also been cropped and sharpened.  Here is the original:

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So, what do you think of my editing?  How is your spring going, did your plants struggle this year? Ours are just now starting to bounce back.

Cheers!

Travel Theme: Close Up: It’s Time for Chickens

It’s a great time of year.  It’s chicken time:

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These eggs are part of a life cycle unit that a friend of mine who is second grade teacher teaches this time of year.  It is getting close to the end of the year, so it is harder to keep the kid’s attention as the weather get nicer.  This unit however, is fascinating, and a highlight of the second grade school year.

So, this is one of my first photos of this year.  The next step will be for these eggs to go into incubators.  As you can tell, there will be a variety of chickens hatching this year.  This is, in part, to show the kids the diversity that can exist among a species.  The chickens that hatch will eventually go to local farms.

You may wonder why I chose this for this week’s travel theme, close up. It’s my opinion that education should make you wonder about the world around you when you are young so that when you are old enough you can go out exploring on your own.  Projects like this one help bring that larger world close-up in a tangible way.  In a less direct connection to the travel theme perhaps,  I think it is good for the kids to see a part of how their food chain works close up. Often, I think, food just appears in front of them without any real discussion of how it got there. If there is to be a lovely natural world for them to explore as adults, I think it is important for them to be informed of where their food is coming from.

I’m pretty “egg”cited about this project, so there will be more posts as the unit progresses.  Feel free to drop by again to check for updates, your comments are welcome below.

Cheers!

Travel Theme: Round

I guess I had been holding onto these photos waiting for the travel theme at Where’s My Backpack? to be round. This is the week my friends!  The photo below I took at Laumeir Sculpture Park in St. Louis:

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This edited version is an HDR image that has been processed in Photomatix.  Here is one of the original exposures:

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It was a sunny day so it would have been hard to get a perfect exposure in just one photo, so I knew I was going to edit the image into an HDR image.  Also, the veins in the eye were just screaming for the over the top result that HDR can easily give you.

Laumeir Park is a nice place to walk around, you can bring a picnic if the weather is nice and enjoy looking at all the art.  The particular piece is called The Eye by Tony Tasset, and it is on permanent display in the park.  It almost always has folks standing around it, how could you not stop and stare at an eyeball that is 12 feet in diameter?

So, what do you think of my HDR treatment of this piece of art? do you think you could walk past it without stopping? Your thoughts and comments are welcome below!

Cheers!

Still as a Statue

I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to post for the travel theme statues at Where’s My Backpack? when I saw the original post on Friday.  But yesterday I was looking through some of my files when I came across some images that almost looked like statues.  So I chose one and set out to make it look more like a statue.  Here is what I created:

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This is a Cape Thick-knee who lives at the St. Louis Zoo.  I had shot this image using exposure bracketing, so I created an HDR image using Photomatix.  I ended up thinking that the Black and White artistic setting ended up looking the most like a statue.  In Photoshop then I cropped and sharpened the image.  Here is the original:

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It is a bird that blends in with it’s background, and it was sitting very still, so it would have been very easy to miss.  It has lovely colors, but what do you think of my stone version?

Cheers!

Butterfly

I hadn’t been in awhile, so last week I stopped by the butterfly exhibit they have at the St. Louis Zoo.  As butterfly houses go, this is a small one and it is often crowded.  It was when I was there, but I still managed to set up and use my tripod.  But if you are in the area I would encourage you to stop by.  It is a beautiful spot.  Despite the crowd, people seemed to be relaxed, perhaps a result of being around natural beauty.  I got this photo:

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You will see that the lighting on the butterfly is a bit uneven because he was in a sheltered spot.  Because I knew that I would have difficulty getting all the detail I wanted in one shot, I set my camera to get a bracketed exposure.  So, the final photo you are looking at is an HDR image I created using Photomatix.

In order to get as much detail I also used a low ISO, and therefore needed a slow shutter speed and a tripod for this shot.  Once I had created my image in Photomatix I then opened it in Photoshop.  I cropped the image, sharpened it and then applied a blur to the edges and background.  Here is one of the original images, to give you an idea of what I started with:

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Pretty big difference I think, but before I started editing, I thought the final image was in there, just waiting to be revealed.  What do you think?

I didn’t know it when I took this photo but just a few days later, gardens would be the announced travel theme at Where’s My Backpack?, so this image is my submission for this week.

Cheers!

Travel Theme: Tempting

Sometimes when I am traveling, I am tempted to put my camera away.  Sometimes there  is a good reason for that, but honestly most of the time it is because I am tired.  I was just on the verge of putting my camera away the other day when a docent came up and told me I had to take this picture:

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He was right, so three cheers for the docents at the St. Louis Zoo!

I am on a break from my Photoshop class, so for this photo I just did some cropping and sharpening in Aperture.  Is this an award winning photo? No, but it is a nice snapshot of this Red Panda in the morning light.  If you go to the zoo, I would recommend going early to get the best morning light and to beat the crowds.

This Red Panda spends a lot of its time resting and roaming around near the back of her home.  I have few photos of her, something I have written about before here and here.

Do you talk to docents when you visit places like the zoo? We do, they tend to be very knowledgeable and passionate about their subject matter.  Have you ever had a moment like this, where you were about to put the camera away and someone told you not to?

This post was written in response to the theme tempting at Where’s My Backpack?

Cheers!

Travel Theme: Ancient

This week’s travel theme at Where’s My Backpack? is ancient. I was at the St. Louis Art Museum this past week for a special exhibit where I saw this painting and a floral interpretation of it:

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The painting is Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion by John Martin, painted in 1812.  The floral arrangement is by Ivy Baebler of the Federated Garden Clubs of MO.  To be honest, I wasn’t sure what I was going to think of this exhibit before I went.  It turns out, I really liked it.  Of course, because the flowers fade quickly, it is an exhibit that lasts only a few days and is very crowded.  The difficulty in shooting something like this starts with those crowds.  I was also kind of surprised at the number of people who were touching the flowers.  I guess to me it just seemed like the floral arrangements were created works of art and touching them would potentially mess up the composition.  That aside, it was hard for my point and shoot to capture all the detail of both the floral work and the painting.  I tried though, just to give the feel of the exhibit.

Have you ever been to an exhibit like this? I’ll admit I hadn’t.

Cheers!