OK, confession time. This was shot last February in San Diego which was in winter. Yesterday I completely spaced out the image of the day so didn’t do anything new. But I was looking at this one on Saturday when I actually had a chance to go for a photo walk. And it was certainly worthy of posting. Never give up the project just because you screwed up. Now, I’m off in search of Day 21.
Finally a day that was warm enough and dry enough to be outside. As a brown leaf against a blue sky this was interesting but I don’t think I would hang it on my wall. I decided to go monochrome to celebrate the veins and texture in the leaf. I also edited out a lot of extraneous branches. I denoised and sharpened after taking it into Silver Efex Pro where the border was added. Now I think I might hang it on my wall.
Still playing catch up in the nice warm, dry digital darkroom. I don’t know how I missed this poppy in the first edit but it seems to be close to the holy grail of poppy portraits. Here’s hoping that ll this winter rain will bring a glorious spring wildflower season next year.
In post processing I cropped a little, added saturation and denoised. A little darkening of the corners for depth.
It is becoming very clear to me that a big part of photography in winter is catching up on post processing. So I will make no more excuses about not shooting something new. Yesterday while beginning the tedious job of combing through all my images from 2015 and deleting those of little or no redeeming value, I came across an entire file of spring wildflowers that had not been completely processed. This Dandelion is just on of several I brought along. It benefited from cropping, saturation, and sharpening. Though It is a little distracting I still like the blurring one peeking out in the background.
It’s getting to be that time of year when I have to start weeding the files and trying to come up with my best photos of the year. Sometimes I come across one that was never processed that has real potential as in the case of this one of Japanese maple leaves shot in Lithia Park’s Japanese Garden back in November. If the weather doesn’t straighten up soon there may be a lot more processing and a lot less shooting in the coming days.
So, today it was all about post processing. It was cold outside and the light was incredibly flat. And I still have several days of processing to do on the Coast photos. I chose this one, not because it was my favorite of the day but because it needed the most post processing to get a worthy image out of it. The viewpoint where Heceta Head Lighthouse has been photographed about a billion times was closed for construction. From the parking lot below you could barely make out the lighthouse through the trees. I was with a group so I couldn’t climb up the path for a closer view. So I squinted through the trees and took a shot. It took a lot of vibration and saturation to bring out the red roof of the lighthouse so that you can actually tell there is a lighthouse there. But I kind of like the moody mysterious look of this. Not that I would enter it in any contests.
In a brief moment
Between passing winter storms
A rainbow appears
Yeah, I haven’t been too inspired to do Haiku but this one just popped into my head. So only two weeks in and this is already starting to feel more like a chore than and adventure but I shall persevere. Once we get past Christmas and if Mom can just stay well, then it might get to be fun again.
This rainbow was pretty faint so it took some saturation and detail extration to really bring in out but I like the end result.
Well, I think this lost a lot in the translation to jpeg but snow is certainly a good winter topic and works well in black and white. So there’s another thing I can work on during this project.
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.
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.