Have you guessed what it is? I was hurrying back from getting a much-needed haircut early this morning before the storms arrived. I had my eyes focused on the clouds hoping for a good image and almost stepped on this one. It is small ants on the sidewalk.
I’m certainly thinking, if not looking, out of this world.
I was out walking in the middle of the day in the hot sun and I noticed light reflections on the surface of the pond. While the dirty, scummy surface of the pond didn’t look that attractive to me, I did see possibilities for some images. I don’t know, maybe the heat was getting to me. I’m also heading back to the hospital for the third time for some minor surgery to have an infection in my arm treated so that also might be the cause of my insanity. If you think I’m losing it, just disregard this post.
I’m always saying that it should be possible to find an image anywhere. These images aren’t much, but they have gotten me interested in trying more different things. Some of my pictures worked better than others so I might try this again when I see the right mixture of scum, waves, light-angle, etc.
Some questions have come up about what I did to make my flowers so vivid. Look at the above two pictures … an image that was in my previous post. The first is as converted from raw file with no additional adjustments. The second is the way it looked in the last post after some adjustments. I did apply a little contrast, clarity, and a small amount of vibrancy, but no increase in saturation in-order to get it to look this way. The biggest adjustment was not to the flowers but to the background and surroundings. By darkening the background it makes the flowers stand-out. It gives them a little three-dimensional pop. The more you do to isolate the flower you wish to emphasize, the more it seems to pop off the page.
Some pictures of a few of the flowers in our yard. Marcia plants them; I photograph them. She spends a lot more time working with them then I do. These were developed exclusively with LR5. It has speeded up my process since I no longer need to use both LR and Color Efex Pro for these effects.
Since I didn’t have any new pictures to work on I decided to use some older ones to create some soft and cool backdrops for use as backdrops in slide shows, etc. The more I look at these the more I like the effect. Depending on how they wear on me and others I might make some more pictures similar to these.
The above are a few pictures that I took this morning of one of our Hostas in the front yard. I used them to experiment some with a few of the new capabilities in LR5 and then finished them off in Silver Efex Pro 2.
The Great Blue Herons are usually low flyers. Did you ever notice that they fly with their long necks folded? It’s flying towards the roof with its long legs straight out behind it. This one had just left the pond where I photographed the bullfrog. Hmmm, come to think of it, I haven’t heard it lately.
It was a slow day yesterday, but we were expecting storms later. I had stepped outside to see if I could find any interesting cloud formations, but there were none. Fortunately, this heron decided to fly over our house and, more fortunately, I had my K-5 in my hand. I might not like the weight of the K-5, but it never lets me down and is quick to turn on, raise, zoom in a bit, focus, and then respond instantly when I hit the shutter. I was actually able to fire off four single shots very quickly.
It took me a while. He was hiding and I couldn’t see him until I walked around the pond a bit. You can see him hiding in the middle of the third photograph. I then zoomed in on him in the last picture.
I love to listen to his deep bass call throughout the day and night, but he does sound lonely.
We have muskrats in two ponds at Homewood at Plum Creek. These are muskrats, not ground hogs, not rats, and not beavers … muskrats! They live in holes in the bank.
I took these pictures while visiting with the Defibaughs and sitting on their patio last Saturday evening. Pepper is their dog.
