June Storm Clouds

I snapped this one off of my front porch one dark morning in June. The angularity of the power lines and the rolling puff of the clouds balance each other out in this photo. I just love a dark ugly cloud.

Experimenting

So I have been really digging seeing people post pictures done with the Hipstomatic app for the Iphone. The Lomo style pictures are like fruity drinks for your eyes. I tried a couple of times to replicate the look following a incredibly convoluted step by step process in Photoshop, but I have not used Photoshop often enough or don't have the same version as the explanation and got lost in a scary cornfield.

So what I decided to do was take a cast off photo of my nieces and nephews mulling around waiting for a group shot to be taken and play with it. Here is the original



Nothing special . I was tuning the settings for the group shot and this was a little bright. Then I cropped it to center on the girl in the stripped dress. I left the exposure alone, pulled the Recovery way up and added a little Black. Next I brought the Brightness down a bit and maxed the Contrast. I pulled the Vibrance up 30% and the Saturation 20%. Lastly I tweaked the Temp thirty percent towards the blue end of the spectrum and the Tint twenty percent on the green side. A little Vignette work and this is the finished product.


As with everything I have been doing in this blog, it's not great, maybe not even good, but it is a starting point. The more I learn to control what I am doing in Lightroom, the sooner I will figure out how to take the photos to make them look like what I envisioned.

Black & White Portraits

I really like doing bright overhead sun portraits in Black & White. The sun accentuates the graininess of the B&W shot and gives you some great shadows. And sometimes color images can really be brought to life by turning them B&W in the editing stage. Here is one example. This is a mundane profile shot of my brother Troy.
This doesn't say a whole heck of a lot to me, but it is clear so I keep it.


First I cropped it down to a head shot, then clicked the Gray Scale button in Lightroom. As far as editing, all i did was crank the recovery to define his profile, then I dropped the exposure down one full step darker and added 15% to the Blacks. Once that was done, I decided to crop in further to really highlight the texture the B&W had given his face. This is one end result I am very happy with.

Cropping To Change Subject.

Most of the time when you take a photo, it is a defined subject that you found interesting, and wanted to capture. Sometimes you capture something about that subject that makes it a great picture. Most times it is just a straight up rendering of the subject.
Sometimes there is a secondary subject in the picture that is more interesting and can be highlighted with a crop or editing the photo to black & white. As long as the original shot is in focus, you can find something to bring out in any image. Today's post is one of those times. While vacationing in St. Andrews, my nieces and nephews found a crab washed ashore by the tide. I took a shot of one of them holding it.



Pretty straight forward picture of someone holding a dead crab. While checking the clarity in Lightroom, I noticed how dirty Nathan's fingernails were and that the sand and water drops looked cool. So after a quick crop and color transformation this is the finished shot that I like a lot better.

Purple Iris

In the previous post I incorrectly identified the flower as a Orchid. It is actually an Iris. As is this one. I have always enjoyed taking shots of flowers. They are the easiest subject matter. They won't squirm, move or blink. This Purple Iris was just coming out of the shower when I snapped the shot. Lucky me!

Garden Party

This shot is from my mother's garden. I believe this is a white Orchid, but I may be wrong. I took this around eight in the morning while the rain was still on everything from the night before.

This was taken in Auto mode from 3.1 meters with a 75 - 250 mm telephoto.

And We're Back!

It's nice to be back among the plugged in. Don't get me wrong , that ten or twelve day period of cyber stasis is refreshing. But there is business at hand - including this blog. Now to put the nose back to the grindstone.

We had a great trip, even if the weather wasn't always co-operating. Lots of the overcast thing. I managed to take some photos for this page in between family pictures. Many were taken in walkabouts in my parents gardens and in the woods behind their house.
Some were portraits that had a little something extra and were turned into something else.

Today's shot is a picture I took of my brother Scott. While editing I realized that my parents patio was reflected in his sunglasses and decided to make a crop of it. As always, click to enlarge.