Old Barn and Old Truck

A little Photoshop work.  A friend took this picture and I needed a something to try some texturing and what have you so I used his work.  Little crop here, some graininess there with some painting and this is what you get.  May not be for everyone but Gene, my buddy, and I like it.  May not be for everyone.

 

 

A Couple of Sunrise Shots

Been away from doing much on the Blog of late.  Bought a book on Lightroom 5 but haven't had much of an opportunity to take any shots then on day a fellow Focus Photo Club member put up a great picture of a road in the early morning where he took a great shot of the sun light coming through the trees.  This inspired me to take some photos. 


I almost lost this one with a blown out sky but was able to salvage it.  There's a little HDR thrown in and then edited to un-sharpen the effect.

 

 

 

This one looks like an edited on of the first but the sun would be in there.  It was taken just a few minutes earlier.  The sun rises very quickly so you have to be ready.  It would help to have two cameras set up differently, like if you wanted ND filters on like I did but things just change too fast.  So, I took an already pretty good silhouette picture and amped it up a tad.  I call this Metallic Sunrise.

 

One Step Closer

I'll jump in if you get any closer.

An Early Morning Visitor

The face of authority as is the eagle and falcon.

I got several shots of this hawk sitting on the deck railing.  The problem was that I didn't want to spook it by raising the blinds so all that could be done was to twist them open.  I didn't even know it was out there until my wife told me so I hurriedly retrieved the camera.  I edited it in PS to hide the lines from the blinds.  I love their faces.  A little HDR effect as well.  Possibly a Red Tail.  The two below are of a Coopers Hawk.  Much bigger bird.

This one was on the neighbors deck a couple of years ago.

This was last year.  A Robins nest was in the tree above it.  You can see one of the babies on the ground.  It became part of the noon day meal for this magnificent bird along with its two siblings.

Early Fall?

The weather this year has been just plain weird.  Lots of rain giving this area a bumper crop in soy beans and corn.  The farmer markets have some really nice produce.  Last year we were begging for rain.

We've only had one week of temps in the 90's.  Most of the summer has seen daily temps in the mid to low 80's.  But this week we have ventured into what one would call FALL temps.  Today it barely climbed to the upper 70's and tomorrow is forecast to be 69 at noon and 71 at 4 PM. Tonight is forecast to be 49 degrees.  Whoaaaaa, only 17 more at we're at the freezing mark.

Great opportunity for some fantastic sky shots.


A morning ground fog shot with sun beam coming through the pines.

ND Filters.....A Learning Curve

I've been working with two new filters I bought for my camera.  I have 4 filters now, the first was the clear UV protection that everyone should own to protect their lens.  After all, after the camera the most expensive part of your arsenal for photography is the lens.  My lens isn't the most expensive by any means, Tamron 18-270mm DiII VCD, but it was more than my first camera that I put it on.  Now that I've upgraded my camera they run neck and neck.  I digress....I then purchased a circular polarizing filter to assist the camera in real bright midday lighting to get better colors.  Now I have two more filters.  They are the ND Neutral Density 0.6 and 0.9.  These help with clarity, like looking for the fish in the water commercials or cutting through the haze of the day when the humidity is so high.  They also add depth by darkening the shadows and you can take still shots and have motion.  This is when you put the camera on a tripod, set the shutter speed to something longer than stop action 60 or above and what ever moves in the focus plane of the lens is blurred.  Good example would be a waterfall.  You can take pictures where you see the drops of water and only assume motion or you can use these filters and get various types of motion from yea it's there to what looks like soft snow.  Personally, I don't like the latter. 

This was taken on a bright afternoon, with a lot of wind.  I set the camera up on a tripod, opened the f-stop to let vary little light in and then lengthened the shutter speed to over a minute.  I had the .9  ND filter on due to the amount of light.  The house is stationary while the smoke tree in the foreground is showing movement.  I also converted the color picture to b/w.  All editing was done in LR 5 except for resizing and file extension.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In this photo I used the .9 and the .6 ND filters since I was shooting into the light.  As you can see, the bottom of the clouds was darkened, the sun was able to give a flare of light as it was peeking around the umbrella.  I did use the graduation tool in LR 5 from the upper right corner to somewhere below the sun.  This was for me to be able to light the green grass in the bottom of the picture.  Other than that it is pretty much right out of the camera.

 

 

 

 

Save the Bird

We've had a pigeon hanging around for about a week.  Started off on the neighbors window sill.  Sat there for 2 days straight.  Found it on my landscape wall yesterday and today while I was across the street talking to someone it came walking from somewhere like it knew us.  I went home and got some wild bird seed an fed it.  It ate like it was starved.  The gentleman that picked it up said it was thin.  He also said the variety was know as Arc Angel, a show bird variety.

When we first noticed it I got my camera to see if I could get a reading off the tag on its leg.  I then tried to decipher the tag with no luck so I called a local pigeon club and they came a picked it up.  They said the tag was special because most tags are two letters that indicate where the bird is from, like AU or IF and CA.  This one was TSCSH with 2011 under that and on the other side in bolder print was 2024.  Bottom line is the bird won't be the meal for the Red Tail Hawk that hangs around this area.

Click on bird to increase.