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. 

Gearing Up For Halloween

Another shot from the Academy of Sciences. And no, I don't remember what kind of spider this is, but I was pretty glad there was some glass between the two of us.

Reminds me of the spiders in Thailand. Some of them shared our house with us, from time to time. And they were big, and hairy, and about the size of your hand. My strategy for dealing with them was just to give them their space. You want the wall in the kitchen, big guy? It's yours. Have at it. Be my guest. I'll just . . . just . . . uh, I think I hear someone calling my name in another room.

So the spiders and I got along pretty well. Now Evan, on the other hand, as usual, had a different approach. I won't elaborate on all the mishaps he got into with the spiders, but let's just say he discovered that getting them onto a broom handle he was holding was not such a good idea. And that mace doesn't do much to spiders, but does seem to affect the cat who was sitting in the room and watching you. And the girlfriend when she gets home hours later and realizes you sprayed mace in the house.

Anyway, this sucker looks nothing like those spiders, but he does look like you don't want to mess with him.

Purple Haze

Evan told me I shouldn't blog this because too much is out of focus. Ha! Showed him. (For those new to the blog this is another Lensbaby Composer and +10 macro filter shot. I actually am really liking the combo for a certain look. For sure, that look is not 100% in focus. But I've been loving the blur lately.)

So now that I've shown this to the general public, let me know what you think. Too blurry? Probably. You can tell me. I can take it.

In other news, I attempted to switch from coffee to tea this morning. I drank three cups of black tea, and I spent all day feeling slightly hazy (kind of like this flower! hmmmm...). Conversations were slower, objects seemed to move toward me at increased speed. I normally only drink one cup of coffee a day, but I am not a morning person. Never have been. I'm never really coherent until 3 hours after I wake up, doesn't matter what time. Coffee can push that back one or two hours, so it's been kind of a staple in my professional life. Just seems fair to me that if someone's paying me to do something I should be mostly coherent. I'll let you know how this experiment goes. I'm going to try again tomorrow. (I have visions of tea-drinking leading to some yoga-filled, uber-healthy, triathlon-winning, raw-vegetable-eating life. Most likely the first and last step will be the tea.)