When I visited Carol last week, I kept coming back to the basil in her back yard, which made a beautiful subject for my camera as I experimented with two of her lenses. The first two shots were taken with her 70-200 f/4 and the last with her 24-70 f/2.8; both are dream lenses!
Carol kept urging me to post one of my basil shots and call it “What a pity, Basil.” I had no idea what she was talking about! She finally explained here.
Last night we returned home from an all too quick trip to California, where we managed to reconnect with many of our friends, despite the last minute notice and short time frame. As I wrote in my last post, my friend, Carol, put us up for a couple nights in the Sacramento area while my husband had an appointment. We drove down to the Bay Area Friday, where I dropped in on my school (where I had taught first grade for 23 years) and visited with some of my very dearest friends and colleagues. Saturday was a whirlwind- a visit with our HeartMath class at Unity of Walnut Creek, lunch out with a group from the class, afternoon coffee with two of my teaching partners (and dear friends), and a wonderful dinner at Sailor Jack’s with Jan and Jack (Jan is one of my Rapunzel friends- and the only one who was able to make the drive over from Petaluma this time). I know we will be coming back, and we’ll catch up with those we didn’t manage to see on this latest visit.
As we walked out of Sailor Jack’s Saturday night, Lonnie said, “Take a picture of the lights.” He knows how much I love the little white lights that dot all the trees along First Street (all year long now!). I only had my cell phone and just took the one shot, which I posted on Facebook. Last night, I converted it to black and white, which I may like even better.
The scenes below are now covered by a deep blanket of new snow (with temperatures far below zero), but, during my visit a week ago, only the mountains were completely covered.
The top photo was edited in Photoshop with textures from Florabella and Jessica Drossin.
Being able to experience life through the eyes of a two (almost THREE!) year old was one of the pleasures of spending a week with my grandsons at their home in Yellowstone. The snow was almost gone when we got there, but Henry had a great time stomping on ice and watching the cracks form as we took a walk one day.
Textured with two layers each of cool grunge and sybil, from Kim Klassen for Texture Tuesday.
No, I haven’t gone crazy since moving to Arizona- at least I hope not. I am continuing to practice my Photoshop skills and going WAY outside my comfort zone by doing photo compositing (that IS a word!) with THREE photos and two textures to create this image, which is a sort of visual summary of the highlights of our day in Sedona last week.
BTW, Is Your Mama a Llama? is a book that I used to read to my first graders.
Here’s a shot of Carol (former roommate from college and beyond) on the way to Jerome the other day. It was incredibly underexposed, because I accidentally left the exposure compensation set to -2.7 (I can’t believe I still make beginner errors like that!), so I had to do a little rescuing in Lightroom. And by the way, NOTHING is straight in this photo- it was a sloping wall, uneven terrain, hills of different levels- yikes!
As we watched TV the other night, I put took one of my sunflower photos into Topaz Simplify to give it a bit of a painted look for fun.
I had fun playing with one of my Sedona images- adding textures from Jessica Drossin.
Photo taken on walkway at Bell Rock, Sedona
Top: standard Lightroom edit (exposure, clarity etc.- basically the top part of the Develop module)
Middle: standard edit with Kim Klassen’s autumn preset applied
Bottom: standard edit, then converted to a black and white with some split toning
I almost didn’t take any photos in Sedona last week; I felt I couldn’t do justice to the intense colors and beauty of the amazing landscape, especially with the harsh light and shadows of late afternoon. And of course, I was right. But, I couldn’t resist taking some shots as we walked around the area of Bell Rock and its neighbor, the Courthouse. I wasn’t planning to put them on my blog, because both images suffer from horrible contrasts, washed out colors and a cloudless sky. I know that if I go out there at the right time of day with some nice clouds, I will get a better result. However, these photos gave me an opportunity to practice my editing skills in an effort to salvage something to remember this outing.
The first photo was first edited in Lightroom, adjusting highlights, shadows, clarity, vibrance and more- but then I did some work with luminosity masks (a way of adjusting the luminosity/brightness of a certain range of tones using channels in Photoshop), a technique I re-discovered when visiting a local photo group. I had read about this on Clickin Moms a year or so ago, used the technique a couple times- and then forgot about it. At the photo group, someone mentioned adjusting the luminosity of a photo- and a chorus of voices called out “luminosity mask.” In fact, they may have said, “TK luminosity mask.” This week, I googled luminosity mask and came up with Tony Kuyper’s wonderful tutorials on using this technique- and I bought a set of his actions, which were MUCH more extensive than what I had done on my own before. Although not difficult to do, it made me realize how much I still have to learn about Photoshop. I love using Lightroom so much that I usually don’t bring my photos into Photoshop except for cloning/healing and adding textures.
So here is Bell Rock. If you look closely, you might be able to see people walking the trail up to the top.
The second photo was also edited in Lightroom- then taken into Photoshop, where one of Jessica Drossin’s textures, Mumbai, was added to bring out the colors and add in some contrast that was lost when bringing down highlights and bringing up the shadows.
My fall color photos today aren’t from my neighborhood. Friday we took a drive through Oak Creek Canyon, a beautiful area between Sedona and Flagstaff. It was the middle of the day, definitely not the ideal time for photography, but the scenery was breathtaking- much more so than these photos show. These were all taken at Slide Rock State Park.
Thanks to our friends winning tickets for the train from Williams, we spent two days and a night at the Grand Canyon! This was a first for both my husband and myself- and it did not disappoint! We stayed on the South Rim and, yes, the hotels are really right along the rim. Magnificent!
We took shuttle buses in both directions, stopping off along the way to admire the views and take photos. I kept complaining about the harsh light and lack of clouds the first day, but sunrise and plenty of big puffy clouds made up for it on day two.
We only had two mishaps. The first was on our first stop on the first day- a gust of wind lifted my Tilley hat right off my head and into the canyon. The second was an hour later, when a bug on her hand startled my friend, Debbie while she was taking a photo. She screamed and threw her iPhone over the railing onto a tiny, scary ledge below. A young, hunky European (?) guy crawled through the railing and down onto the ledge below and retrieved it to our amazement. He then walked even further along the ledge and stood with toes at the very edge in a King of the World pose. Yikes!
Here are two of my many photos, the first taken at sunrise by our hotel.
On one of the weekend days at Yellowstone, I accompanied my daughter’s family on two mini-hikes. The Wyoming skies were magnificent- blue with puffy clouds everywhere. I love this rural scene of a horse barn near where we stopped to eat lunch.
I’m back- after spending a week in Yellowstone mostly playing with this sweet boy- and then another five days back in Benicia. Miles was busy at all-day Kindergarten (8:05-3:45!), so 2 1/2 year old Henry was definitely the star of my photos this time. I’m just beginning to edit my photos, but these two jumped out at me. He is just so darn cute!
With all the sky-gazing that I’ve been doing, I haven’t taken any time to photograph anything else. I am hoping to get back in the groove of doing photography in the mornings at some point soon, but for now I’m editing a photo I took in La Jolla a couple weeks ago. I am missing doing floral photography, and, although I have a yard of mostly rocks, I plan on getting outside soon to photograph the flowers I do have and to get a shot of the hummingbirds that frequent the yard.
I used 3 layers of Kim Klassen’s new savor texture- love this one!
Hanging around– a lame play on words referring to the Flickr topic, hanging, and our current status of hanging around waiting to move into the new house (one more week!).
I do enjoy the hotel elevators.
They are either incredibly busy (breakfast, happy hour) or pretty empty (middle of the day, evening). There is great people watching here!
And here is HANGING.
melinda anderson photography 