Saturday, May 28, 2011

Week 29 - Tulip Lifecycle

If you have been keeping up with my Project 365 you may have noticed several pictures of tulips.  I decided to photograph the same patch of tulips from buds to flowers to... not flowers anymore.  Well, the project has gone as far as it's going to get this spring. Here is a sampling of the series.










Saturday, May 21, 2011

Week 28 - Lightroom 3

I don't think I've done a post yet about how I am storing, sorting and post-processing my images.  Well the answer is Lightroom 3.  Okay, that isn't the complete answer.  First I get the images from my camera, save them to a portable hard drive, save them again to a networked drive and then finally import them into Lightroom.  Do I really need that many backups?  I have one backup on the network to guard against hard drive failure and another portable backup to guard against fire or theft.  That feels like the right number for me.

That finally brings us back to Lightroom.  For years I just used the Canon software that came with the camera to sort and edit photo but found I was too limited by the tagging and sorting options and also needed better photo editing software.  I started reading reviews and blog posts on the subject and decided that, for my needs, Lightroom 3 and Photoshop Elements would be good.  So far, things have worked out well.  I still think about Photoshop CS5 but I need the capabilities of Elements so rarely that it's hard to justify the expense.  Lightroom manages my library and does almost all of my post-processing as well.  Only occasionally do I want an effect like in my recent post about false miniatures that requires Elements.

Here is a before and after example of a simple change in Lightroom that creates a great effect.  I simply used the saturation sliders which are split by colour and removed every colour except red and orange.  By the way, the before and after comparison is a feature of Lightroom, this is just a screen capture.

In addition to all the manual work that can be done in Lightroom, there are also some pre-sets that come with or can be added to Lightroom that can create some very interesting effects.  For example this picture is straight out of the camera.
 And here it is after applying on of the presets.

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Week 27 - Best of Project 365 - April

I said last week that either my photography was improving or I was gaining confidence, now I wonder if the more recent pictures are just more familiar and therefore I feel closer to them.  Only time will tell I suppose.  It is nice to finally see a few more birds and flowers in the mix though.

My favourite for this month isn't a flower or a bird it's these bullrushes with Nelson's Big Orange Bridge in the background.  It's my favourite for the month because it surprised me the most.  The surprise isn't that this isn't the picture I was trying to take it's that I like it so much better than I thought I would.  I was playing with depth of field to try to find the point where the background was clear enough to be recognizable but blurry enough to not detract from the foreground subject and I think it worked quite nicely.  It's almost more a picture of the bridge than the bullrushes.
Canon 20D, Sigma 150mm lens,
ISO 400, f/16, 1/200s

Saturday, May 7, 2011

Week 26 - Wow! Half a year has gone by already.

I can't believe it's been half a year already since I started this blog.  To be honest, I wasn't sure I was going to make it this far as writing is definitely not one of my strengths (as if that hasn't been obvious to everyone).  26 weeks ago, I signed onto Blogspot and started learing how it works.  Not sure I've learned a whole lot about that but I have learned a lot about photography and challenging myself and the value of practice.  Since starting this blog (and starting my Project 365) my photography has steadily improved, or maybe just my confidence in it.  Either way, well worth the effort.  On any given outing, I take fewer pictures but I like more of them than I used to.

Here are a couple of macro pictures taken last week.
Canon 20D, Sigma 150mm lens,
ISO 400, f/8, 1/320s
Canon 20D, Sigma 150mm lens,
ISO 400, f/8, 1/200s