Taking Out The Laundry

I decided to do some experimentation with these photos I took of myself. I intended on doing this but I wasn't sure how they were going to fit together in order to get the result I wanted. I made an attempt and this is what I got. I consider it phase 1 because there's a lot more I could do to it, but I like to do things kind of "quick and dirty" at first just to get the idea from my head onto the screen. I know if you look closely you can see exactly what I did, but as I said its a quick and dirty edit for now. So here it is:

The Path

This is another older photo I worked on today. Cropped it down, added a little HDR toning, amped the color saturation up a bit for depth, and this was the end result. I'm learning that properly cropping a photo helps A LOT in creating a very pleasing image. I always hated cropping because my thought was, "If I took the photo that way, then that's the way I wanted it.", but by cropping out some unneeded details and even some out of place objects, you end up with a completely different composition. It's kind of like taking a story and rewriting a poem from it. It's still telling the same tale, just in a different way. i was actually quite amazed at what a difference it made to crop it the way I did. Just for fun I will add the original photo under the edited one. Another thing I'd like to point out is that my edited image began as a RAW image and the image below my edit is the "JPEG" version of the original.

Icy River

This is an older photo that I decided to edit slightly to give it more life. I spiced it up a bit and made it a bit more interesting to look at. Brightened the colors and added some saturation and contrast. I'm much happier with this version of it. I also fiddled with the hue and color adjustment to make it more realistic and true to the original scene.

 

Randy In Red Bull

This is a little something I felt inspired to work on late last night. Kinda started as a joke and then blossomed into a few hours of setting up and snapping away and then I spent far too long editing. Make sure you click on the image to see it full-sized. For some reason it got scrunched into the page.

My Moon, Sweet Moon

Do you have any idea how difficult it is to shoot photos of the stars and the moon? Extremely difficult without the right knowledge and equipment. It's so difficult because the light reflecting off the moon is so bright that it's difficult to see it well enough to focus on it. Auto-focus very rarely works and on all the websites I've researched about star shooting and moon shooting say that you should start at "infinity" with your focus ring and keep shooting at different focal lengths until you get desired results. That would take forever! Not only that, but trying to fine-tune your focus by taking shot after shot is just insane! For this photo I used my Quantaray 70-300mm telephoto/macro lens, on a tripod and flat ground in the pitch blackness of my backyard. It took a lot of time and a lot of Redbull to get it right, but I finally got one shot out of it that was decent. The blurry-ness of the image is due to the crappy quality of the lens. If the glass on your lens is junk, you will get junk photos especially when you are zooming in to the subject. The junky glass creates a messy warping effect because of the imperfections of the glass. You can have the best, highest megapixel camera in the world, but if your lens is crap then your images won't be as clear as you think. Evidence:

It's still a pretty awesome photo but I had to crop the hell out of it to make it the size it is.

Castle de Paris

This edit had me cracking up for so long I forgot to post it! If you look closely I think you may find something a bit familiar or maybe peculiar about this photo..... do you see my reflection in the tiles? It wasn't my original intention to put my face on the building, but I ended up doing it just for fun. The original idea was just to crop out everything but the tiles and a small portion of the sky and then adjust the exposure and brightness/contrast controls to make the building stand out more and give it a real metallic feel. Then I suddenly felt compelled to put my face on every tile and I couldn't stop myself!

I STILL CAN'T STOP LAUGHING!!!

B&W City of Boston With Added Clouds

This photo is an old photo I took in Boston, along with the other Boston photos I've posted here before. I didn't like the original, so I used an action file created by "Forf" called Forf's HDR Tools: HDR Fix Heavy. The action file automatically edited the photo to create an HDR style image. It turned out just how I wanted it. There are strong textured lines and contrast between the glass windows and the surfaces of the buildings. I love high contrast images. It gives depth to the photo and make it feel more life-like. I also added in the clouds because the original photo had an almost pure white sky and it drowned out the rest of the photo. I had to soften it up a bit by rendering the clouds using the RENDER filter and selecting CLOUDS. Then I masked out the buildings so the clouds only appeared in the sky, and I used the Gaussian blur to soften the clouds and round out the edges of the masked area. I was quite pleased with the end result.