I was working on a web gallery of my Cuba images yesterday and came across this one that I hadn’t done anything with. I loved the colors of the paddle boats and the water but they were a little dirty and grungy so I decided to try a painterly treatment in Topaz Impression which I love. I also cropped in quite a bit to get rid of distractions in the background and make it all about the bands of color.
It’s true about the old cars in Havana. What they don’t tell you is that most of them are held together with chewing gum and baling wire. They also don’t tell you about the creative colors they have been painted. I stood for half an hour on the street trying to get a good picture by panning the cars as they went by so the background would be blurred but the car would be in focus. I finally succeeded with this Chevy from the 1950s. Just added some vibrance and saturation in post and did a little cropping.
I’m just home from Cuba and I have a lot of catching up to do. This is the image of the week for the week of November 27. I haven’t had access to the internet for awhile. We were hanging out near Parque Cespedes the day before Fidel Castros ashes were to arrive in Santiago. This gentleman was selling shaved ice with some kind of syrup and no, I didn’t try one.
I went to Nik Color Efex Pro for detail and saturation on this one and just a little cropping.
Back when I lived in Missoula, Montana I took some classes at the Rocky Mountain School of Photography. They had a sort of mantra “No, white skies!” In Ireland with it’s almost always cloudy skies this proved to be a challenge. In this image I had almost the holy grail of ancient site photography: A round tower, a celtic cross and the ruins of an old church all in one photo and the tower was framed in a window. Doesn’t get much better than that compositionally. But the sky in the upper corner was a very flat white. So, I turned to Topaz Texture Effects to help me out. I actually found several looks I liked but most were more monotone and I was grooving on the orange color of the lichens so I chose this one which gave me some color in the sky and a kind of crusty look which suited the old ruins well. And, of course, a nice purplely blue sky with texture
Street Musicians
are everywhere in the cities of Ireland. Everything from tin whistles to rock bands I shot this in Galway but then he turned up again in Cork. The instrument is called a concertina. He also had dancing puppets. I liked his feather.
I don’t do a lot of portraits but this fellow definitely had a unique look that cried out for photographing.
I like the way he is framed by the arch but I wish I had gotten the whole instrument in the frame. Cloudy skies in Ireland meant high ISOs so denoising and sharpening have been routine in post processing.
I don’t know if 
anyone noticed but I was so busy keeping up with my travel blog that I did not get an image of the week posted. I am only just starting to shift gears from documenting my trip to creating art so here is an early attempt that was shot last week in Glendalough, County Wicklow, Ireland. There is a lot worthy of photographing in Ireland and being tied to a tour bus is not the best way to go about it. But, I fear I would not be able to drive on the left side of the road and I’m a little too old for hitchhiking so short of hiring a driver I’m not sure how to make it happen.
In any case, I liked the colors of the mountains and the field in this one. I tried it as an impressionist painting but I liked a little more realism so ended up with a texture effect that gave it a border and helped to emphasize the stone church.
I’m on the move in Ireland and I don’t know that this is the best image I’ve taken this week but it is the closest at hand and it is representative of what I came to Ireland to photograph. I hope we will see more like this. I’m finding the lighting to be a real challenge here as the weather cycles through stages of cloudiness, rain and sunshine every day. Not always optimal when you need it. I ended up doing an HDR on this one which turned out surprisingly well given I wasn’t using a tripod. I sharpened it, used a high pass filter, and sharpened it some more but I am still not completely happy with the quality. I do think it will work well as an element in a Photoshop composite.
What with traveling and teaching a new class I almost forgot to post the image of the week on the image of the week site (it made it to facebook). I chose a painterly treatment to soften the details of the people on the barge. I kind of wish I had some people standing on the bridge to add some balance and color but you can’t have everything. I actually had to wait a bit for some people on the walkway to clear out.