I still have lots of images to process from my North Carolina trip but I liked this one for its lines and colors. Lots of shrimp boats in the harbors and lots of ways to portray them artistically. Post processing involved opening up the shadows and adding saturation and sharpening.
I stopped by Wrightsville Beach near Wilmington, N.C. yesterday and there were hundreds of surfers in wet suits. Not to many of them were actually getting up but the fellow did pretty well. I was challenged to photograph them as the sun was behind them. Then I thought to get up on the pier and had a great view from there. I added saturation and denoised this one and then sharpened it.
I’ve been working on digital art this week. The weather has not been too cooperative for getting out to photograph. I’m getting better at blending and adding water color edges. The photo is from Santa Fe. I just felt like giving it a French name.
So, the technique here, in Photoshop, is to mask out the entire image then stamp it back in with water color brushes using white on the mask. I also applied a blending mode which is how the wall behind the bicycle got blended into the background. Looking at it now I think maybe I should have expanded the image a little toward the upper left.
Finally, some flowers to photograph! I love these little guys for their dogged determination in appearing in February before all the other flowers and marking the hope that spring cannot be far away. I used by 180mm macro lens on these and was lucky that they were still hanging on to a few raindrops from the day before.
I have been dragging my feet on posting an image of the week because I didn’t have anything new I really liked. I kept going back to so barn photos I captured this week and trying different processing and finally came up with this one of a barn I love with lots of crazy intersecting rooflines treated in Topaz impressions with a Van Gough preset with opacity reduced a little to let more detail through.
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.
Finally had a break in the weather so I could get outside and do some photography. Lots of birds at North Mountain Park but the Scrub Jays were the most colorful.
I cropped this one a fair amount even though it was shot at 600mm. Detail, saturation, denoising and sharpening.
I’ve been suffering from a bad case of the winter blues mixed with serious cabin fever. I though since I went to Cuba in December I didn’t need to plan a warm winter trip for January. I was wrong. Won’t make that mistake again.
Anyway, I’m plugging away at Photoshop artistry and started playing with these orchard blossom pictures and came up with this composition I call Dreaming of Spring. It went through a lot of steps of blending and filter gallery and Topaz Impression and the addition of an artistic border but I’m pretty happy with the final result.
Traditionally this time of year I am combing through my images to find the top 10 to 25 or at least my favorites. this year with over 8000 images in my 2016 file (and yes some of them belong in the recycle bin) I decided it would be a fools errand. I’m up to my ears in completing an album of images from 2016 which is now up to 56 pages and I’m halfway through October. With 5 or six images a page, well, you do the math, it’s a lot more than 25. Some of the images got in because they are best to tell the story but still, they have to have some redeeming value to make the cut.
So, long story short, this Dutch Iris keeps popping up in my mind when I try to think of my favorite image of the year so I decided to just go with it and skip the filtering process. Ironically, with all the travel I’ve been doing, it was captured about two blocks from my house. It was April, it had been raining and was just starting to clear so the flowers were in prime condition and still had a few drops on them. I have a metal print of this one hanging in my downstairs bathroom, which is also serving as an art gallery.
I will also be using this one for the sidebar of my blog site so, no, you are not seeing double.
The weather hasn’t really been conducive to outdoor photography and I’ve been busy working on my album of photos from 2016. I’ve also been thinking alot about photo composites and digital art so I decided to play around with some ideas I had about using my wood duck pictures in a composite. For the background I used a closeup of a colorful glass plate from a macro workshop a few years ago. Then I added some clipping masks from Anna Aspnes designs. And then I started bringing in the photos. Overall I would say its OK but I’m not 100% happy with it. I would like to see the images blend into the background a little more. I think I like the ones that didn’t quite fit the clipping mask and I added color around the edges the best so that may be something to think about for future. Would I hang it on my wall. Probably. I see it as a metal print.