Weekly Photo Challenge: Jubilant

When I see the word jubilant I think of bright colors, orange and yellow:

ISO 400 4.3mm f/2.7 1/200

I had been stalking these wildflowers most of this week, but rain has made it difficult to get a good shot.  I finally caught a break two days ago in the evening when the rain stopped and the sun made a brief appearance.  I took this photo with my point and shoot camera on the macro setting and set the ISO at 400.  There was a slight breeze, but at 200th of a second, this flower seems frozen in time.  I kept the editing to a minimum.  I cropped and sharpened a bit in Photoshop, then added a grain filter and vignette in Lightroom.

What do you think of the editing? Do you also associate certain words with colors?  Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!

Fun at the Game

When I went to to Blues hockey game over the weekend, I knew that the theme at Where’s My Backpack? is yellow this week.  The St. Louis Blues colors are blue and yellow, so I thought maybe I would have some fun with that.  Here is a photo that I cam up with:

ISO 800 4mm 0ev f/2.7 1/50

I took this photo with my point and shoot when Louie dropped by our section.  I had set the camera to color accent, with yellow as the chosen accent color.  When I got home I edited this in Photoshop.  I went to Filter-Blur-Iris Blur.  When you are using that filter you can pick what you want in focus and then blur the rest as much as you would like.

Just a quick snapshot of a fun weekend outing, but what do you think of my editing? Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!

Travel Theme: Tilted

Sometimes I think it is nice to have a photo challenge to push you to take a photo that you have been thinking about but haven’t taken yet.  When I saw tilted was the theme this week at Where’s My backpack? I thought of this sunflower that I pass almost everyday but had yet to take a photograph of.  So, I grabbed my camera, walked out the door, and went and got this photo:

ISO 100 14mm 0ev f/5 1/50

The camera I chose to take this photo was my Canon Powershot ELPH.  I chose that over my Canon 50D because I think that my point and shoot gets really nice closeup shots.  Plus, it was hot, really hot, and my point and shoot weighs less.

As I was taking this photo I noticed that I hadn’t really paid attention to the background the other times I had walked past without my camera.  I was so busy looking at the beautiful flower I had just ignored all that was around it.  When I got to taking the picture though, I could see how distracting the background was potentially going to be.  Other than the distracting background, I felt that the other challenge in this photo was going to be light.  Too much light in this case.  I had set the ISO to 100, but still the original was a bit washed out looking in my opinion.

So, after taking this photo, I edited it in Photoshop.  I used the “levels” setting to make the color pop a bit.  I also sharpened and cropped the photo.

Here is the original from the camera version:

ISO 100 14mm 0ev f/5 1/50

Cheers!

Another day, Another bee

I wrote yesterday about a bee that I had photographed and then edited into a sepia image.  The post is here if you would like to take a look.  Today I was looking at another series of bee shots and here is what one of the final images looks like:

ISO 800 135mm 0.67ev f/22 1/125

I think it was the bright yellow of the flower that made me decide to keep this a color image.  I managed to get a pretty sharp photo, even with the movement of the bee and the flower.  I had used my tripod earlier in the shoot, but did not for this particular image.  I think the most challenging thing about this image is the background.  There is just a lot going on.  So, the original image I cropped to try and get some of the background out but still leave enough to convey the scene I was shooting.  In Aperture I corrected this photo a bit using curves, I just wanted to darken the image a little bit.  I have also sharpened the image.

Cheers!