Simple Effects~ Exploration Thursday

"Pink Canopy"

(1/160 sec.@ F/8, 55mm fl, ISO 160, bright direct sun, processed in PaintShop Prox2)

Had to work on something cheery today. Southern Ontario has decided sunshine is against it's religion... or something like that. We've had grey, more grey, and various shades of drab now for weeks on end. Ugh.

So you can see why I wanted to post a shot like the one above. This was originally for the City Parks contract last spring. It was such a nice bright day, perfect for glowing canopies of soft crab apple and cherry blossoms. This gnarly ancient crab apple has so much character to it. So I took this shot into Corel's PSPx2, and added two great filter fx to an already sunny shot so that everything would glow and all the textures would pop a bit. Here's what I played with today;

I don't know if there's an equivalent in PS but I took the image into Corel's Cross Processing photo filter, found in the Photo Effex drop down menu and into the Time Machine option. It takes the overall color and adds a very retro coloring to them (big in the 70's) and you can adjust just how extreme you want the color to be. Cross Processing adds a green tinge to brighter hues so you need to decide what style your image is going to take before hand.

I'm of the "less is more" mentality so I apply the cross processing fx filter in a whole new layer so I can control the opacity, how much of it shows up in the final image, and where.

Also, because the filter causes tones overall to darken (not the colors but the various shadows and highlights) and causes details in the darker ranges to disappear, I decided I'd play in a second effect called Colored Edges, found in PSPx2's Effects drop down menu. Again, it's different sliders allow you to be subtle and not over whelming so that the effects themselves don't steal the show, instead of the actual image. I despise when that happens. Again, less is more in most instances. So a very subtle bright white is applied and it edges and rims every detail, so that textures and lines pop a bit, like outlining a picture with a soft crayon. The result is a nicely saturated, brightly colored spring image with great textures and clean details.

I remind myself that it won't be long before the trees will be blooming, and the temps rising, and soon we'll be enjoying sun. In the meantime, the electricity bill is going through the roof because every light in my house is on while I soak in some false rays of light. Where'd I put my mammoth bottle of Vitamin D anyways????

Have a fabulous Easter weekend one and all! Spend it with family and friends!

Thanks for the ramble...

Sunshine ~ Floral Fridays!

" Sunny Bougainvillea"

(1/30 sec @ F/7.1, ISO 100, 100mm fl, 55-200mm Nikkor Telezoom, tripod, diffused afternoon light)

Happy Floral Friday one and all! This will be a quick post for me today, the sun is out and the temp has risen above 0 degrees here in Ontario. Naturally, this means I'm heading out with the Nikon!

Today's image was taken at the Tropical Greenhouse at the Royal Botanical Gardens. The ceiling and displays have these trailing bits of sunshine climbing everywhere inside. Like the greenhouse was sun kissed everywhere you look. Bathed in light. Ahhhh. It lifts the spirits and assures that spring is wanting to arrive soon! Just the color yellow will do that, no matter where it is. It energizes and inspires.

A quick tip. Be careful when photographing at the local greenhouse. If the sun is out, all that glass will make it difficult at time to get killer shots. Everything starts to get washed out, and metering for a more even exposure can drive you mad, highlights either go off the grid, of the shadows from underexposing swallow up select areas. I know for this image, even though it was overcast, all the light coming into the greenhouse was messing with an overall metering of the composition I had decided on. So I made the decision to use a more selective type of metering in my dial/menu options, so that my meter actually metered more from my subject which was essential for the shot than the rest of the area in the frame. When I checked my histogram (the graph feature on your camera for where your lights and darks are balanced in the exposure) I realized the overexposed highlights were allowable this time since they were essentially the backdrop, and not the flowers themselves. Instead of this looking like a poorly made decision, it now looked high key and so I kept the reading and made the shot.

Also, this meant I had to take into consideration the lens I was using. It was my telephoto, which compresses the shot from foreground to background, so even at F/7.1 it had a considerably shallow depth of field where the light and plants in the background blurred out nicely. If I had stopped down to much more narrow aperture of F/11, and adjusted my shutter speed, the blown highlights would have then been a problem again since you'd be seeing a very definitive overexposure problem.

All this was of course shot manually. Auto modes can be handy for shooting quickly in certain situations, but in a semi-auto mode the camera would have tried to correct everything, giving me a very mundane, dull image. In manual mode, I chose every setting myself, and could manipulate which things were more important for me, and get creative with the rest. This is key. Take the plunge all you DSLR owners with your settings on auto. Start learning how to expose. It opens the floodgates of creativity... and allows the sun to shine in.

Have a fab Friday all, and thanks for letting me ramble on! See you all Monday!