day is done

Here’s one from 2008 that I reworked tonight.  I added a bi-color filter from Nik’s Color Efex line and deepened the silhouette a bit more this time around. 

lilies in winter

To further stave off my winter doldrums, I purchased this lily blossom last week at the local market.  I photographed it with natural light from behind and the flower turned sideways.  I didn’t do much post-processing on it other than importing the image into Redfield’s Fractalius plug-in and then playing with different settings until I got one I liked.  I lowered the opacity of the Fract layer a bit to let more of the details shine through while still retaining the glow and soft feathery feel that the Fract plug-in gave it. 

Fairy Wings

I had the macro lens and extention tubes out and was going to town on a lily blossom for over an hour on Saturday.  I got some pretty nice images out of the deal (it was another $5.00 bouquet!) and this was one of my favorites.  Does it not look like what fairy wings would look like if anyone had ever actually seen fairy wings? 

Rework

I mentioned at the beginning of the year that I had dumped a year’s worth of photo editing so I could go back and reprocess the images I was the most fond of with all the tools and knowledge that I didn’t have at my disposal when I first worked on the images.  Today I have one of those reworked images – a beautiful lotus blossom that I photographed at Powell Gardens in 2008, six months after I got my first DSLR.  I laughed when I saw it was in JPEG instead of RAW – and then remembered I was “too afraid” to shoot in RAW mode back then.  So I opened the image in ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) where I went to work on the post processing basics and then took it into Photoshop to finish up the job.  

One of the things I’m finding in reworking these older images is just how much I’ve grown as a photographer in the past two years.  My composition skills, my eye for finding – and photographing – the ‘good’ light, and my skills in post-production have all improved.  I still have so much to learn but it’s great to look back and see where I’ve made progress.

Peony on Frac

There’s a new piece of digital software out on the market called “Fractalius” (made by Redfield).  It’s a lot of fun to play with but very hard to get an image “just right.” 

For this image, I did a round of ‘Frac’, then added a classical soft focus filter from Nik Color Efex over the top, and ended with a full blown round of noise reduction to smooth everything over.  This is the end result of a peony on frac. 

i wish my car got this much mileage

Wow…$5.00 worth of flowers and I’ve already worked up a half dozen new images with many more possibilities to go.  Here’s one that’s rather different – I applied a solarization filter from Nik’s Color Efex and then added a white vignette and a bit of gaussian blur.  This is most definitely a step outside my old comfort zone so yea for the $5.00 flowers!!!

best five bucks

Cold.  Overcast.  Fog.  Wet.  Brown.  Blah. 

I had to take drastic action! 

I took five bucks to the local grocery store and came home with flowers.

Beautiful, yellow flowers.

It’s still cold, overcast, foggy and brown – but somehow I just don’t care as much any more. 

Iceberg Icebird

Just a little play on words there…

I was out photographing a fountain that had frozen over this past weekend and was having a terrible time.  It was very overcast and extremely foggy so the autofocus on my 400mm lens wasn’t working worth a crap.  I had to use the 400mm because there was a base of ice a good 20 ft. out from the fountain so getting closer wasn’t a safe option.  I ended up with several images that were just barely out of focus and a bunch that were worthless. 

This was one of the somewhat OOF images…but I knew there was something there…just wasn’t sure what.  I decided before I threw it in the trashcan to add a spin to it so I went to Photoshop’s filter/distortion/twirl and gave it a spin.  I then adjusted the contrast and added a bicolored filter with Nik’s Color Efex.  Doesn’t it remind you of a bird flying into view?  I love it now…so much for this going in the trash can!

showing my age

I’m turning the big “5-0″ today.  (I say turning because it doesn’t officially happen until 1:23 p.m. today so ha!  I’m still 49!)

I finally got to go out and shoot yesterday – first time outside the yard in over two weeks – so much snow, ice and bad temps that I had to wait for the parking lots at my favorite places to melt enough for me to safely get in and out again.  It’s been a long time coming…

So I headed out to a corner park where the large water fountain freezes over every winter but on the way there I found these peeling bark birch trees and I took one look at them through the viewfinder and thought, “looks like they are all getting ready to line dance.”  Yeah…told you my age was going to show!

So here they are…the line dancing trees doing their rendition of “The Macarena.” 

 

Pharmaceutical Flower

No, I don’t drop acid…why do you ask? 

(This is a combination of the original image, the use of a plug-in by Redford called “Fractalius”, a couple of layer adjustments, the Stylizer filter in Nik Software’s Color Efex and some final tweaking.)

Pretty awesome, isn’t it?  Man, talk about your flashbacks to the 70’s!