Practice makes ... well, a bit better.

I have a lot to learn about my camera and its possibilities. On lazy days, sometimes I spend a few hours just practicing, and then tossing hundreds of photos.

Laurie found these mushrooms in a dry spot near the rhododendrons. I haven't tried to ID them, instead spent time playing around with the lighting, trying to get true colours indoors without extensive Photoshopping afterwards. I photographed them on the kitchen counter against a blue background, to tone down the yellow of the overhead light, which is supposedly "soft white". These turned out almost right; the rest were deleted at first glance.

(I did a bit of post processing, mostly to clean up scattered dust and lighten one where the flash failed to work.)

A bit too much yellow from room light.

Better, but I had to lighten it up, so the blue background almost disappeared.

These look about right.

And I took a spore print, half on black, half on plain white paper. The spores turned out charcoal grey.

The half on white paper. Not very informative, but there's no lighting problem here; I scanned the print.

Over hill and dale and through the fence

I've been holding onto these photos for a year because I didn't know what to do with them. I finally just cropped them slightly and took out a few dust spots from Laurie's camera. Otherwise, this is what his camera saw.

This was late afternoon, last November, with the sun setting on the shore at White Rock. It was quite chilly, which may have had an effect on the light. The sparkles in the trees are Christmas lighting, I think. Laurie was sitting on the railway line, with the camera on the rail itself.

Looking west from the west end of the promenade area. Click to see what the rail does where it meets the fence.

Zooming closer, a minute later.

Looking east. Yes, the rails lie totally flat here; there is no hill. And the rail and fence are hopelessly entangled again.

From the inner rail. Up(not a)hill, down(not a)hill.

Winter on the shore is always wonderful, even with our backs to the water. When it's not raining, that is. I wish it would stop.

Afternoon walk

Laurie was playing/experimenting with odd camera angles at White Rock, and this was one result; a couple walking along the railroad track, against the muted colours of late fall vegetation. To me, it looks like an impressionist painting.

Untitled

I did nothing to this, other than resizing it for the blog.

Picnik on a lazy day

Sometimes I need a totally wasted day, doing nothing, going nowhere, reading, watching the birds outside my window and the bugs in a jar on my desk, napping. If I do any work, it's useless work. I call it "catching up to myself."

Yesterday ... ( I never know whether to call it yesterday or today; I'm not in bed yet, but it's already tomorrow. And the date on this post will be the 24th, "tomorrow", by my reckoning.) ... so, yesterday, Saturday, was one of those days. I finished off a Terry Pratchett book and started a Ruth Rendell. I ate leftovers. Had a good nap.

After supper, I downloaded the upgrade for Picasa (3.8), the program I use for tweaking photos. It came with a link to Picnik built in, so I took another look at it.

I haven't liked Picnik before; it always seemed so slow, and didn't do much more than Picasa does. It's faster now, and it has a few more options, fun stuff. I spent some time putting Hallowe'en fangs on a spider, and changing colours, getting purple water or green, red and blue geese, replacing backgrounds with geometric designs. (Hard work, but pointless; perfect!)

Down at the very bottom of "Effects", I found the Sandbox and played there for a couple of hours. Here are two photos that I worked on:

Coming up the hill from Kwomais Point the other day, I stopped to catch my breath and whiled away a few minutes taking photos of the ravine. It's urban-fringe forest; straggly weeds, blackberries, broken branches, half-grown trees fighting for the light; it's always dark under there, even when the sun shines on the treetops. I have never been able to get a photo that made any sense.

This time, I set the camera on the handrail of the walkway, and set the shutter to 1 whole second. I didn't exactly aim, because I was too weary to crouch down to see the screen; it was just an experiment, after all.

The photos came out more or less OK, except flat and lifeless, without proper colour. I fed one into Picnik.

Here's the photo, as it went in. Under the trees, the walkway crosses the ravine, before it starts up the last half of the ascent.

I added a blue Vignette, and used "Ripple Blocks" from the Sandbox, and got this. I sort of like it; in spite of the wavy lines, it looks more like what I see than the untouched photo. More messy, darker under the trees, with more texture. (Click on it to see it full-size; this little one doesn't really show the effect.)

And there was a spider at the top of the stairs, hanging in front of a No Parking sign:

Another Sandbox tool, "Hypnotic", gave me this:

And with about 2 minutes work, too!

I won't be using the program much; I try to get most of our photos to show what we actually see. But there will be more lazy days ...

Pink and black

While I've been busy lately, Laurie has been entertaining himself. He went out at dawn and took these photos:

Dawn over the vacant lot

And when the lighting is poor, he gets creative:

I don't know which way is up on this one.