Saturday, February 06, 2010

Friday Photo of the Week; February 2010

Friday Photo of the Week: February 12th.

Made it back to work this week so less time on my photos…sigh. My photo for this week is one I took in New Zealand in September 2009. I stayed over at my cousin Glenda’s house for a couple of nights and one morning in the kitchen area I noticed the sun shining through the venetian blinds and the shadows they cast on a nearby chair.

I like shadows images because at times the subject the shadow falls on can change and become something else which is what I found with the chair at Glenda’s.

The image below is one of the few I took.

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Friday Photo :February 5th 2010

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The above photo is my Friday photo but I added the ones below to demonstrate what I have been doing over the last week.

The past week I’ve spent at home nursing a broken clavicle, the result of a fall off my pushbike. I was riding because I am wanting to get riding fit for Cycle Queensland in September of this year. As I been unable to do very much I’ve spent a lot of time in front of the computer learning how to use Photoshop Elements. The above image is one I have played with, with adding texture layers. The original image started life looking like this one below,

SONY DSCThe photo was taken at The Glenbrook Steam Train site near Auckland. The end result is quite different and I like both versions.

So far I have played with 7 different images. One of the other images I used was a image I had converted to black and white then selectively brought back areas of colour within the picture. The original image I took near Bellechaume where JP’s brother lives. The buildings are old brickworks.

joigny070628 222The image is a little pale, flat and lacking a bit of contrast but I liked the overall look of the old brickworks. My first attempt at playing with it was to create a black and white.

SONY DSC                     With some dodging and burning I played with the ‘lighting’ in the image to produce the above result. the dodging and burning also help bring back the overexposed sky areas.

The next time I played with this image I selectively coloured [or as it is sometimes called popping colour] some areas. Unfortunately at the time I didn’t know about dual conversion or layer stacking so the sky is overexposed.

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It was this image I used to play with with adding textures.

SONY DSC                     The result is above. i wanted to add a frame to it using the frames supplied on the CD with the October issue of the UK magazine, Digital Photo. The frames are for an image around an A4 size so I had to lose some of the edges of my wide image to make it fit. The result is below.

oldbrickworks002Now all I need to learn is how to make my own frames in the size I want. I have also learnt how to create dual conversions for images, one conversion for the shadows and one for the highlights. The images are then copied and pasted together with the burnt out areas being deleted to reveal the ‘better’ look underneath. I may go back and rework this image now I know how to get the sky right and not burnt out.