I have been working hard on the macro side of flower images this Spring. Closer up and not worrying so much about the bloom being centered or fully in focus. The first three photos are of Tulips, the tricked out pimp of Spring. The fourth is a purple Iris. The fifth shot is of a Pink Gerbera Daisy. The yellow flower is a Hibiscus and the final image is of Slender Toothwort.
The following photos are some of the last ones from the spring 2012 season. The sun sets late, the bus shelters all got their glass replaced and the taggers have other stuff going on in the summer. Most are from a great session where a heavy rain was turning to snow after midnight on an April night. It was so worth jumping off the bus to catch these shots.
As some readers may have noticed I have been on a bit of a break for the past six weeks. Leading up to that I had been spending a lot of time 'catching up' - taking a day every week or two and writing the posts for the photos and pre-dating them to correspond with the date they were taken. I did not set this up as a true 365 project, but for some reason I pushed myself into that kind of a mindset.
Between May 30th, 2011 and April 13th , 2012 I managed to get 240 posts in. Quite a few were done on the weekly catch up format, but even then I was doing the writing through the week, saving the drafts and putting the posts together on Mondays.
The near future holds posts that will be thematic compilations - monthly street photo best of, graffiti overviews, portrait posts and so on. I will still pepper the photo posts with details of new techniques and editing tricks I begin to use as I encounter them.
About the same time as the posts stopped I got a bit more involved in my job and the break from posting couldn't have come at a better time. With that breeze behind me, and sails unfurled I am ready to set sail on a slightly different course. I am spending more time doing street photography, more time in black & white and less time at work.
So I took this photo at a family gathering and decided to use it to test a couple of new techniques. The first was using Nik Silver Efex Pro for turning color photos into black & white. it is a plug in program that works with Lightroom. Dozens of classic presets or you can adjust all the values yourself and make custom presets.
The other technique was using the Spot Removal Tool to get rid of a large object and replace with a color from somewhere else in the photo. In this case, I covered up the arm in the lower left hand corner of the image with the same color black as the rest of the shirt. Here is the end result.
This shot was taken from the very back seat on a STM bus as it was maneuvering through traffic on a horribly wet night.
This bright sign for the onward Gospel Church made for great subject matter reflected in a rain puddle.
Stopped by the waterfront on my way home to catch the full moon rising and was faced with a real bummer - a huge cloud bank over Laprarie where the moon should appear. I waited around for about 45 minutes, and just as I was going to give up I spotted a orange glow near the top of the clouds. Snapped off a few of the big reveal, then spent 20 minutes trying to get some good shots of the moonlight reflected on the water.
Believe it or not, the first signs of spring are upon us here in Montreal. The trees are starting to bud and with a couple of weeks of climbing temperatures and rain ahead of us, April could turn out to be a pretty sweet month.
So part of my process towards being able to do street photography has been carrying my camera with me everywhere and taking more shots in public with people around. In the metro, in bus shelters or on the bus, slowly I am getting comfortable shooting with an audience and it won't be long before I can start using some of these bystanders as subject.
I liked this because it almost looks like a spooky alien skull or something. The shelter is getting pretty saturated with tags and I am sure they will have to clean it up soon. Can't wait to see what the kids do with a new canvas.
In this one I tweaked the background color to give the image a winter's night feel.
