Beyond Beyond 14

Our lesson this week had so many great tips and tricks! We learned animated GIFs which I had tried once before, selection tools in Photoshop (including one that makes me want to upgrade to CS6), working with curves in Lightroom, and extending the background on a vertical photo so that it fits better on your blog.

SanDiegoMar2013-8240-Edit-Edit

As you can see, I really took that last lesson to heart.  Here is a vertical image, nicely extended into a somewhat horizontal one, which fits so much more nicely on this page.  What you probably can’t see is that I played with the Lightroom curves tool, adding haze and lightening some of the colors, AND I took it into Perfect Effects 4 and added a sky with clouds (with much reduced opacity so that it blended in with the original sky)!  Although I haven’t made a new animated gif, I feel like I got my homework DONE!

By the way, this photo is from our trip to San Diego in March.

Melinda9 Comments

Famous Mo’s!

Last Friday, my husband and I finally got to visit Famous Mo’s, the new coffeehouse and theater in Rocklin opened by my college roommate, longtime friend, and photo buddy, Carol Smith.  We were not disappointed- great food, a cool atmosphere, friendly staff, and fabulous coffee! We were there in the daytime, so missed out on the nighttime music scene, but we will definitely be back!

Carol had just learned to make lattes the day before, and this was her first made for a customer- me! It was delicious- better than Starbucks’ (sshhhhhh. . . )!

19Apr2013-0756

Carol and her business partner, Jesse Horn have created a terrific place to go have coffee, lunch, or snacks during the day and to experience great entertainment on weekend nights.  Carol’s creative touch is evident in the menus, signs, and even the photos on the walls.  Check out Famous Mo’s website and Carol’s photo blog to find out more about Carol and her great new coffee and entertainment spot!

Melinda4 Comments

Mini

I wandered around outside with my macro lens today.  This is a tiny detail of . . . pine needles?- some evergreen, anyway.  There was enough sunshine for some great bokeh. The shallow depth of field with macro always amazes me – this was at  f/10!

18Apr2013-0715

Melinda3 Comments

Beyond Beyond 13

It was all about SKY in this lesson- replacing sky, to be exact. 

17Apr2013-0665-Edit

There was not a cloud in the sky yesterday when I walked over to the open space in my neighborhood to take this photo.  I took a few shots, mindful that I was going to have to use the Quick Selection tool in Photoshop when I edited this photo.  Selection tools and cloning and healing brushes were the hardest things for me when I first started photo editing.  I have become fairly proficient with cloning and healing, but tend to avoid the selection tools most of the time.  I like brushing best- so often use Quick Mask, which I learned in Damien Symonds’ class, instead of the other selection tools.  

For this assignment, I downloaded some skies, following Kim’s link, forgetting that I have a couple available in Perfect Effects, and was pretty successful with my Quick Selection tool.  I ended up converting it to a black and white, possibly because I had just watched a Moose Peterson series of videos on Kelby Training on black and white photography.

Replacing skies will probably not be big in my arsenal of Photoshop tricks, although it is great to know how to do it- and I need more practice.  I felt like I had crossed some sort of line with this assignment.  When I saw Scott Kelby last year, he said his rule for himself was he felt comfortable removing items from a photo (telephone wires, tourists, etc.), but not adding things.  He had replaced a sky once, but never felt right about it.  But in Moose Peterson’s video that I watched yesterday, he casually remarked that he sometimes combines waves from three photos when photographing the ocean.  And I read on Damien Symonds’ Facebook page last night that he has been known to clone eyelashes (!) from one eye to another to fix an out-of-focus eye when he is retouching photos. Wow!

I do love Photoshop!

 

Melinda7 Comments

Sweet Peas

This is one of several photos I took at our book club grandma shower a couple days ago.  I was showing our hostess, Kathryn, the effect of aperture on depth of field (she has a DSLR and would like to learn more about how to use her camera).  I really like this shot showing shallow depth of field, which is enhanced with a layer of Kim Klassen’s sybil texture.

15Apr2013-0530-Edit

Melinda1 Comment

Grandma-to-be!

Our Book Club has a tradition- we celebrate the impending birth of member’s first grandchild with a Grandma Shower! At last night’s meeting, we honored Diann, whose first grandson will be born in a few weeks.  After a taco salad dinner, we ate a delicious cake from Nothing Bundt Cakes and actually talked a bit about the book (The Girl With No Shadow by Joanne Harris).  Then Diann opened her gifts- lots of books and clothes and a pack ‘n play from the whole group. We certainly know how to welcome our friends to grandma-hood!

Here’s Diann getting ready to eat taco salad.

15Apr2013-0545

And here she is getting ready to read Goodnight iPad to the group.

15Apr2013-0588

Appropriately, this week’s Texture Tuesday topic is celebration.  This photo of the beautiful cake (with sweet peas in the background) is textured with Kim Klassen’s sybil texture.

15Apr2013-0539-Edit

Melinda7 Comments

Woman on a Mission

For the last week, I have been obsessed with my macro lens and water drops on flowers.  More specifically, I have been obsessed with capturing refracted images on waterdrops.  I have had a bit of a time doing it, actually.  The first two days I tried it, I all but threw up my hands in surrender- I couldn’t even get anything I wanted to appear in the drops. But I have finally had some success!

Here is my orchid plant reflected in a water drop on my jade plant. Somehow this was easy. Off camera flash helped illuminate the drops. And the photo is flipped, by the way- the refracted image is always upside down.

12Apr2013-0499

12Apr2013-0494

My next goal was to get the image to appear in more than one water drop at a time- harder!  What became difficult was not getting the image to appear, but to get the drops in the right places so they were in the same focal plane. Yoiks! I ended up using drops of Karo syrup on a wilting Gerbera daisy (no daisies were harmed in the making of this photograph).  I did get drops that stayed- but they were small.  And in the quickly fading after dinner light, I needed a lot of flash.

13Apr2013-0528

13Apr2013-0523

The last photos were taken at f/40- just for the sake of depth of field.  I know these are not ideal settings.  These images are greater than life size- the real drops were very tiny.  I next plan to take some photos where the flower looks more pleasing- these look to me like they’re from another planet!  But that’s for another day, another week, another month . . .

Melinda3 Comments

Yellow Orchid

11Apr2013-0486

 

We had a wonderful week with our houseguests and dear friends, Debbie and Dale, who left Wednesday to go back to Arizona. Most mornings while they were here, they would see me dragging my tripod around while I worked on macro photography. Before they left, they gave me a beautiful orchid plant to photograph. So here it is, Debbie and Dale- I’m sure you will see it a few more times on this site! We miss you!

Melinda4 Comments

Beyond Beyond 12

Tint and/or type was the challenge this week- and I went with tint, specifically using the graduated filter in Lightroom to create tint presets for black and whites.

I’ve been doing a lot of macro lately; here is my original image edited in color.

9Apr2013-0405

I made a virtual copy, which I converted to black and white.  Then I added a very slight lavender tint to a couple graduated filters which I positioned on angles in the image.

9Apr2013-0405-3

And here is my third version- a black and white conversion with yellow and lavender tinted graduated filters.  Looks like sepia. . .

9Apr2013-0405-2

 

 

 

Melinda13 Comments

I Heart Tea

It’s more closeup shots today- these feature my heart-shaped tea infuser with one of my grandmother’s teacups.  I edited both with one layer of Kim Klassen’s sybil and another of return for this week’s Texture Tuesday.

tea heart diptych

Head on over to Kim’s site to see some beautiful textured images!

Melinda10 Comments