Category Archives: Still Life

Day 39 – Oak Leaves

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oak_leaves_restyle

I realized I haven’t been doing much indoor photography despite the uncooperative weather. Today being another sunny but too windy to have fun outside day I decided it was time to dip into my box of found treasures. Feathers, leaves, acorns I’ve been saving for a rainy, or windy, day. I shot this handheld with the EOS M on a neutral background which I then blurred out using a Gaussian blur filter. Then I added a texture also blurred and blended. I finally settled on multiply though I wasn’t totally happy with the colors. So I took it into Topaz restyle and ended up with something I’m pretty happy with.

Day 23 – Oil Can

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Oil_Can

I’m thinking I may have to change the name of this project to 100 days of post processing. Certainly plenty of material to work with. I found this old Oil Can at a logging museum near Chiloquin, Oregon last summer. I wanted to give it an old timey look suitable to it’s age and found just the effect I was looking for in Nik Silver Efex Pro. I added the border to spruce it up even more.

Day 12 – Umbrellas

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Umbrellas_texture

It’s still raining so when I saw these two umbrellas nestling in the corner at my Mom’s house I knew they had to be photographed. I wasn’t too happy with the color contrasts with the wall so I did some magic in Topaz Restyle and Impression. But I also wanted a border so I started playing around with textures. I’m not entirely sure I love what I came up with but one of the goals of the project is to get inspired to try new techniques and get out of my rut so this has me thinking more about what I can do with textures and I will spend some of these dreary winter days working on that.

Day 11 – Glass Display

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Glass

Here’s another one from the coast trip. We spent some time in a glass shop while learning to blow our own floats. It is still raining, I am still playing catch up and I am now on elder care duty. Good thing I get to make up the rules as I go along. This was a display in a glass shop. I did very little in post processing. A little cropping, a small levels adjustment and some spot healing to remove spectral highlights.

Day 8 – Lunch

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Salmon_Cake

The weather at the coast continues to be frightful but we were treated to a cooking demonstration at the Lincoln City Culinary Center and served this delicious lunch consisting of arugula salad, salmon cakes and roasted Yukon gold potatoes,

I was shooting at 6400 ISO so I wouldn’t have to use flash. I had to do some color adjustments to compensate for the warm lighting but otherwise it was just noise reduction, sharpening and a very slight crop to manage edge distractions.

Day 2 – Bottle

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Bottle

I had some errands in downtown Ashland this morning then went to lunch at the Granite Taproom. I came home with several images that could have qualified for image of the day but finally decided this closeup of the top of my water bottle at the restaurant was my favorite. I was particularly fascinated by the old school mechanism to hold the cap on the bottle as well as the blue color of the cap. Red lamps on the adjacent tabletops added another pop of color.

This was shot with the Canon EOS M 18-55 mm lens with a closeup filter. ISO 1600 1/160 at f8. I often subscribe to the f8 and be there school of thought when hand holding. I was pleased with the way background blurred out. In post processing I went with extreme detail extraction in color efex pro with also a significant amount of saturation and warmth.