Category: Art

Day 7 – Give me a ring

Telephone2

So, how fun is this? I went to breakfast this morning at a restaurant in Newport called La Maison, which I highly recommend by the way. It is a little off the beaten path a block from 101 in a neighborhood they are now calling the Deco District after about three Art Deco style buildings in the area. I decided to take a walk with the sweet 50 and stumbled upon an antique store that specializes in old telephones.

I learned a lot about the telephone industry and snapped away with the Sweet 50. The out of camera image was pretty dull so I kept heaping textures on it to try and get some color into the background. I wasn’t completely happy with it so I took it in to Nik Color Efex Pro for a border. Well I had been experimenting with maximum detail on an early image so Nik offered that up to start me off and I went “that’s what I’m talking about.” I added my signature because this is more of a digital art piece than a photograph.

Day 2 – Sunflower

Sunflower

Today I chose the Velvet85 for my camera walk and headed out to the Talent Pollinator garden, which is small but usually has something in bloom. I wasn’t too thrilled with my results and decided to walk around the block to where I had seen sunflowers in someone’s front yard. Right next to the Pollinator garden is a vacant lot and imagine my surprise and delight to find it filled with wild sunflowers.

The Velvet 85 and it’s sister lens, the Velvet 56 are designed to have a slightly soft velvety look with a hint of glow around the edges. With a minimum focusing distance of 9.5″ the short telephoto Velvet 85 can hold it’s own in macro situations and is well loved by portrait and wedding photographers. At 1.2lbs the Velvet 85 is a challenge to hand hold. Did I mention that all the Lensbaby lenses are manual focus? But with a maximum aperture of 1.8 you can get some pretty fast shutter speeds even at 100 ISO. I had the lens mounted on my EOS R which is the only full frame camera I own so maybe not the best choice for flowers as the crop sensors on my other cameras would maximize the telephoto effect for macro shooting.

In post processing I started by opening the shadows and added clarity, vibrance and saturation in Lightroom. Then I took it in to photoshop and did some color balance adjustment as being in shadow was making it appear too blue to me. Next I added a preset from 2 Lil Owls which helped to bring it out of the shadows a little more. Finally I added a texture which gives it a little bit of an old timey look.

 

Circles in the Sand

Labyrinth1

Unbeknownst to me by March trip to the coast happened to coincide with the Beach Labyrinth schedule (https://www.sandypathbandon.com/public-schedule). It is these kinds of serendipitous events that keep me motivated on a project like this. I had shown up at the beach to photograph the sunset and initially just took a few grab shots of the labyrinth and walked on by. But as the clear sky sunset set up to be very boring indeed I realized that the labyrinth was the main event and went back to see what I could do with it. I especially liked the decorative circles like this sun. I processed it in black and white to downplay the flare in the upper right corner. I supposed if I worked at it I could hide it a little more but I kind of like the wabi-sabiness of it… Imperfectly perfect.

Ice Skater

Skater2w

I’ve been thinking about photographing skaters at the ice skating rink for almost a year now. I didn’t make it over there before it closed last year so I finally made a point to go play with my new camera this weekend. Most of the skaters were pretty slow at best or wall huggers at worst, forcing me to back away from the wall where I was trying to photograph. But this guy was into it and created some good motion blur. I treated it with a duo tone effect… not quite black and white but almost.

Water Bucket Bodie

WaterBucketw

I’ve been neglecting the image of the week again as I have been working furiously on a scrapbook of images from 2018. Ten more pages to go. But I challenged myself as I go along to find images that would look good processed in black and white. I really like how this one turned out. In color the bucket kind of got lost in the building. This was captured in Bodie, California.

Day 97 – Yellow Flower Detail

YellowFlowerDetail

I started going through the archives looking for something I could use today but either I just wasn’t feeling it or I’ve already used all the good ones. So, I went after my bouquet again with a super macro lens. I think there should be more depth of field in the front. But, it is what it is and I need to move on to other things. I did a high pass filter and added a lightroom preset which helped tone down the saturation. Then added a texture for a little more interest at the edges and masked it out in the center.

Day 95 – Morning Glory

MorningGlory

Monday’s I teach my OLLI class and by the end of it I am totally exhausted. About three times today I thought “Oh, yeah, I need to do a flower.” But it wasn’t until I was relaxing with a glass of wine and Dancing with the Stars that I realized that I never did it. So combing through the archives again. I found this Morning Glory from North Mountain Park. I intentionally shot it with the sunflowers in the background to add that pop of yellow color. I wish the black fence wasn’t there but I guess it is to keep the deer out. And today was new texture day in the texture club so I had to try one of the new ones here.

Day 91 – Echinacea

Echinacea

Today is my Mom’s 86th birthday. She doesn’t really need any more things and she doesn’t get out much and she has been wanting to check out the new Indian Casino in Yreka. So, I thought the nicest thing I could do for her today was take her on a little outing. I came back with $100 more in my pocket than I started with and she had a good time even though she didn’t win much. But, long story short, there wasn’t much time for flower photography so I went back to what I shot yesterday with the Velvet 85. I really just liked the colors on this one. I brightened it up a bit and then the texture I chose brought it along a little further. High pass filter and a little touch up with the spot healing brush.