Day 359 - Photoshop Experiment

Playing around in Photoshop Elements 8 and trying out some textures.

Day 314 - Textured Rose

My first attempt at adding a texture failed pretty miserably! :-(  I need to revisit this technique soon.  Maybe even tomorrow.  Please don't complain if you see me posting the same flower photos tomorrow as well.

Further, since I was in a hurry to do the shot of the day in fast fading daylight, I didn't take the time to do a CWB on this.  I want to try doing that, and also taking the time to get the colour of the rose right. I'd never seen such a dark burgundy colour rose before, that's almost bordering on brown.  I couldn't come close to reproducing the colour in camera or in post.  Need to retry!

Day 212 - Sneak Peek ...

... At what I've been up to with the smoke shots.  I'm still going through a huge learning process of working with Photoshop, but once it's done, I'm going to be one whole load more proud of myself! :=D  This still needs a lot of perfecting, but it's one step at a time!

Enjoy the soup!

Day 166 - Ferry dock at sunset

I was determined to go out and do some photography today as it was sunny, bright and beautiful after a long, long time.  I thought I'd almost forgotten what the sun looked like!  I had wanted to do some bird photography, but after doing the shopping for the month and with the exhaustion I have been feeling, I pretty much didn't feel like getting out early enough to find birds.

So, I checked on the sunset times and went out with about 45 minutes in hand to get to the place where this hidden ferry dock is.  I have posted some pictures of that earlier in my blog, and honestly, I didn't really experiment with a new perspective this time, as I wanted to try out HDR, as it has been my latest fun thing to do ( I actually try to learn something new and practise a few times so I don't forget it in a hurry).

However, I didn't bring my tripod with me because this place is a very long walk from home, and I would be slowed down with the added weight.  But I knew I could rest my camera on the railings there.  But believe it or not, it was so windy, it was actually moving the camera around when I rested it on the railing.  Fortunately, I was able to do some quick shooting when the winds went down a little bit.

The shot was created from the 5 bracketed shots below:

 

Here's the final HDR image that I created using CS5.  I added a little bit of saturation, and sharpness as I found that it looked a little washed out.  Also, the original HDR image was too grainy, so I removed some noise in it and added back a little shadow to make it look more realistic.  Afterwards, I added a border and voilà!

Day 149 - Bailey's filled chocolates

I am starting to get into indoor mode already.  So, the first thing I did was to dust off my external flash that I had bought a few months ago and started experimenting with it.  I recently bought a few coloured bristol boards to use as backdrops, so along with my backgrounds, flash, and a steel serving tray that I use as a reflector, I got to work.

I used my 90mm lens for this shoot as the weather was pretty gloomy and I needed a faster lens to keep the ISO as low as possible.  I still had to have it at 400.  Most were shot in manual mode with the exception of the last one that was shot on AV.

With flash at a 60 deg angle to camera right at 1/64 power.

 Same set up but with flash at 1/16 power. 

 Off camera flash was pointed at the ceiling at 75 deg.  The on-camera flash was covered with a piece of paper to filter off the light since the camera was barely a foot away from the subject.  

This one is SOOC, shot only with ambient light. I think this is by far my favourite shot.

The top one was shot with the flash to camera right, at 1/16, and the steel tray used as reflector to cast a kind of rim light on the chocolate to the right at back.  The bottom shot was with ambient light and the reflector at camera right.

One of the last shots of the evening, I had a really hard time exposing the chocolate in focus.  I intentionally kept it away from the window side so I could use my flash/reflector to see how that would work.  I can't say I like this one much at all, but it was a good exercise to see how I could work with it. 

A fun shot - I seem to like doing this a lot lately! ;)

This was actually the very first shot that I used as the basis for the rest of the shoot.

               

Day 139 - Fighter planes

I had no intention of going out with the headache I had all day, but when I heard these aircrafts zipping by a few times, I knew it was time for me to get my camera out.

I took a few shots, but it was at around 2:30 pm and the hazy heat was a bit too much.  My 250 mm didn't perform all that badly, but I definitely could have done with some more telephoto power.  I could have definitely used the C-PL, but in my hurry to get the shots, I forgot to pick it up.  :(

I recomposed the shot a little in Photoshop Elements, because the aircrafts were too far apart and that's the reason there is the lighter section in the middle of the image.  Someday I have to learn how to use post-processing for better results.