. . .for orange and brown leaves, warm socks, and PUMPKINS! Fall is my favorite season, so you have been warned that the occasional pumpkin will be featured here!
This is a Lensbaby photo converted to a black and white for my photo club’s monochrome challenge this month.
Driving across western Kansas yesterday, I snapped photos from the car as we went along, and a few are decent. But Lonnie spotted this farm along the way and pulled off onto a country road so I could take my time and the photos would have a good chance of being in focus. I love the barn and silo! I know I could never have been able to hack it as a country girl, but I love rural scenes.
Lensbaby Edge 80
I’ve been keeping my Lensbaby on my camera all the time, trying to get as much practice as possible. When we are on a long road trip, we almost never stop for photos, so it has become my habit to take photos with my phone through the window as we drive along. On this trip, I started using my big camera instead of my iPhone to take these photos.
One of the assignments in my Lensbaby class was to take photos of objects that are moving (using manual focus, the only way you CAN focus a lensbaby). Although the subjects of my photos weren’t moving, the car certainly was! As we drove through eastern Colorado, I used the sweet35 optic to capture the scenery along the way. My favorite photo is this landscape (I love the light), which is NOT in sharp focus. I used Topaz Simplify and some added textures to give it a painterly feel.
The next day, as we drove through the plains of western Kansas, I used the Edge 80 optic on my lensbaby, which I found fairly easy to focus at 60 plus mph. The sky was very overcast and eventually gave way to heavy rain as we drove along.
Lonnie knows I have a bit of an obsession with photographing grain silos and farms, so he actually took an exit so that I could take photographs of this one from the road instead of from a moving car!
One of my favorite things about photography is how much I NOTICE now! And it’s contagious- even my husband notices more. As much as I enjoy creating a still life, the most exciting part of photography for me is when I happen to catch a glimpse of beauty in the every day. Then the challenge is to somehow capture what I saw. The other day, it was this reflection of a tiny bowl on the black surface of my dad’s dental cabinet. The Edge 80 was on the camera, so that’s what I used.
I edited the photo in Lightroom, and then I took it into onOne’s Perfect Effects 8 for a couple finishing touches. I realized recently that I have never really MASTERED this great program (and now there’s a newer version!), so I’ve been playing with it more lately. I’ve even used it to add textures (you can import them from your hard drive or use the ones within the program). For this image, I adjusted the color, added a bit of glow to emphasize the reflection, and then added a vignette.
melinda anderson photography 