Fractured Reflections, and Interruptions in the Early AM

I was woken up this morning by Evan making a loud whoooshing sound. At 5:30 am, which, if you know me at all, is not my usual wakeup time. I'm much more a 7:30 kind of girl, 9:00 if I can finagle it.

So I gently said, "Evan?" Translation: what in heaven's name can have possessed you to make SUCH a noise at SUCH an hour? He said, "Shhh. I think something's eating the cat food."

Now internet, I may not have mentioned that our house is currently under major construction and there are huge holes to the outside in places. I don't mention it because I'd rather not, if you catch my drift. I like for my blog to be a construction-free zone. Anyway, turns out a band of merry raccoons (we surmise, as we never actually saw the perps), after having entered our house through one of the lovely construction-created holes, were gently unrolling our bag of cat food and bringing out handfuls to munch on quite carefully. It's the only explanation that accounts for the fact that there were no holes in the bag at all - just it had been unrolled to open it. And no mess around the bag either. Raccoons are notoriously clean eaters, I think.

So, anyway, raccoons, here's a message for you: we hid the cat food. It's gone, sorry. So no reason to pay another visit. But, uh, thanks for having such nice table manners?

On the Square

As a former Linguistics student I can definitely tell you that square is usually not a positive term. It's a synonym for dull, stodgy, boring. Conventional.

And most people will tell you that it's harder to make square photographs exciting. People prefer wider pictures to taller pictures. But I've been seeing a lot of beautiful square pictures recently and it's something I really want to start experimenting with. So consider this step one.

A note about this photo: I took it one evening in Yerba Buena park in San Francisco, while I was explaining a few photography concepts to a friend. I mostly just took this to show him the effect a long shutter speed has on moving water - makes it turn to silk - but then I got all into the composition and stuff, and ended up with a photo that I really like. Is that instant karma or what?

Looking for the Light

As photographers it's always hard to determine how much of the success of the photo is due to the person who pressed the shutter and how much in the subject matter. Certainly there are some things it's almost impossible to take a bad photo of. Flowers, for instance. Picturesque travel locations. Beautiful women.

And that's why a photo like this always pleases me when I find one. It's conceivable, of course, that someone else could see this office plant peeking through the blinds in this office building window and see the possibility, but I think it unlikely that many people would.

Here I appreciate the diagonals against the parallel verticals, the green against the white, and the curves against the lines. Plus the living against the lifeless. This is full of contrasts. Plus it kind of is reminiscent of a reaching hand.

Oops!

I just realized that I didn't edit this photo in Lightroom before I sent it to PS. So here is just a Lightroomed version. A little darkening of the background, and selective sharpening. This might almost be my favorite version of the image, actually. Embarassingly.

Anatomy of An Image, Week 2

I thought this week I'd try something new. First, here's the image.

Specs:
ISO 100
Focal Length: 55mm
Shutter Speed: 1/640 of a second
Aperture: f/2.8
Lens: my 17-55 f/2.8 IS which hardly ever leaves my camera, honestly
Time of day: late afternoon, facing west

So this is some bouganvillea I encountered on a walk home, with some nice backlight happening. A nice image, sure, but not groundbreaking. Any flower with light coming through the petals is going to have some visual interest. Below is another image I took on the same afternoon, with the same light, except that I took this one facing south. (Side light for texture, remember? I went a little crazy with that theory on this particular afternoon.)

My plan for this image of paint peeling off a garage door was never for it to stand alone as an image, although there is certainly some visual interest there. No, I took this for the sole purpose of using it - gasp - in PHOTOSHOP. You know it, that tool of the devil and overzealous magazine editors who use it to prune models down to toothpick size, removing and adding body parts at their will. 

Well, I had a similarly nefarious purpose. I planned to take the texture layer, and then overlay it on the picture of the flower, to add a little more visual interest. Now there are plenty of tutorials out on the web on how to do this - if you can use PS it's pretty easy. Here's a quick and dirty:

Step 1: Open both files. I was lucky, I shot both with the same camera and both were uncropped so I didn't need to do any resizing. This made step 2 super easy.

Step 2: Copy the texture and add it as a separate layer on top of the flower. You shouldn't be able to see the flower any more - oh no!

Step 3: It's ok, we can bring the flower back. If your texture is colored in any distracting way you should switch the blend mode of your texture layer to Luminosity. In my case, I kind of liked the subtle yellow, so I left the blend mode at Normal. Then bring the opacity of the texture layer waaaaaay down. I mean, almost so it's not there any more. I'm not kidding, mine was finally at 3%. But then I'm a fan of subtle. And it depends on which texture you use as well, I'm sure.

And you end up with:

Subtle, right? But a bit different. (Feel free to sound off in the comments and be like "Jessica, I do not see a gosh-danged difference at all!) Back when everyone and their grandmother was overlaying textures onto their images I was a little skeptical. But now that the fad has died down a bit I feel like I can experiment without being part of a fad. And that's so important to my self image, you know?

Another Beach Image

This one similar to the beach photo I posted last month. Actually, it was taken at the same time. And like the other I processed it in color and in black and white. What do you think? There was something about the light on this particular day that I really loved.