Trader Joe’s had some little pots of lavender for sale, so I snagged one that was wilting rapidly in the afternoon heat yesterday. It has perked up nicely today, and it is now blogworthy! I do love lavender, and am so happy to have it in my yard again!
Taken with my macro lens and texured with Kim Klassen’s 1301 and sybil textures.
I rarely desaturate a photo to this degree- and I NEVER EVER use a white vignette. Never say NEVER!
I started with a Lightroom preset from Matt Kloskowski (he offers them free on his blog); this one is called Wedding Fairytale. I’ve actually used it a few times for flowers (it would be great for newborn babies too, I think); it’s a good one! I added a layer of Kim Klassen’s 1301 texture and this quote from Bill Cunningham, a street fashion photographer for the New York Times (this week’s Texture Tuesday’s challenge is to add words to our photos).
Speaking of beauty, head on over to Kim’s site for some links to beautiful textured photos; the link is at the bottom of the page.
My husband loves to plant geraniums in pots on our deck- they are colorful, they live forever, and they can take a lot of neglect. Here is a macro of some tiny geranium buds- if you look fast, they almost look like roses, don’t they?
Textured with 2 layers of Kim Klassen’s 1301 and one layer of Cora.
Yesterday I had a wonderful morning photographing flowers and plants in our backyard and then editing them with textures. This is why I retired!
Textures are from Florabella.
I got out my macro lens again, this time capturing some of the bits of Spring around our garden.
In the wake of last week’s tragedy, I thought of this clip I saw on Facebook a few months ago. Such wisdom from Mister Rogers . . .
For Texture Tuesday- edited with two layers of Kim Klassen’s 0303 texture.
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.
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.
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.
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 . . .
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!
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.
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.
And here is my third version- a black and white conversion with yellow and lavender tinted graduated filters. Looks like sepia. . .
I’ve been having fun with macros of flowers lately (ahhhh Spring!). When I took these photos of waterdrops on Gerbera daisies, I noticed a refracted image in one of the drops. No, it’s not a ladybug, it’s another daisy!
I’m not sure what these itty bitty flowers are, but they are in a pot on our front porch. They look a LOT bigger than their actual size when shot with a macro lens.
We had a really fun lesson today that would have been so useful in my teaching and scrapbooking days. Maybe I’ll be inspired to get back into digital scrapbooking or at least more card-making. The lesson had to do with finding a bunch of objects in one color, taking a photo, and then making a layout using color swatches from the photo. Really, really fun! There was also a lesson on creating presets of color hazes, which I actually already know how to do, thank goodness. I used one of my haze presets for the first photo.
Because I was waiting for my houseguests (Debbie and Dale!!!) to arrive, I wanted to get my homework done quickly. I actually skipped the first step of taking a photo and found two photos to use that had lots of shades in the same color family.
This is from our visit to Balboa Park in San Diego; I almost stopped traffic to get this photograph!
And this one is from our own backyard (last week).
I realize now that I shouldn’t have used a white background for the layouts- stretching the image to make the space at the bottom was half the fun for me! I also figured out where to find square brushes- I don’t use many brushes in Photoshop. As I said, a fun lesson!
It is the end of the tulips, I’m afraid. I just have a few left- the purple ones. This shot is backlit- I love how you can see the light through the leaves. This image is textured with two layers of Kim Klassen’s 3003 texture.
For more images edited with Kim Klassen’s textures, head on over to Kim’s site.
Day 3 of tulips!
This photo was taken in response to one of this week’s prompts from my Daily Challenge group- reflection.
melinda anderson photography 