Category: photography and imagery
Rose of Sharon: Three Views
Below are three views of a Rose of Sharon (Hibiscus syriacus) growing in a large pot in my garden, that just produced a cluster of flower buds at the end of July. I took the first image last night, as the sun was setting; the other two are from this morning, when clouds from an incoming storm produced some soft shadows and a bit of luminous backlighting. If the remaining buds withstand August heat for a few days, I’ll post a few more shots after the rest of the flowers emerge.
Click the first image to see larger versions; thanks for taking a look!
Before and After: Swamp Things
There are two galleries below: the first includes a set of images from a woodland swamp in northern New York, and the second contains the before and after versions of the same images, showing the differences between the original and final versions processed with Lightroom and the Nik Collection.
For the first two images, I tried to emphasize the detail of the beaver cuts on the tree trunks, while still conveying the aged, worn smoothness of those cuts. My approach to the third image was to highlight the pair of trunks topped with moss by adding green saturation and increasing focus and lighting on the trunks to separate them from the background.
With the wider angle images of the swamp, I started by treating them as low-key photographs by significantly darkening the backgrounds. As you can probably imagine from looking at the before images in the second gallery, the gray in the backgrounds — once darkened — would give the scene a heavily shaded, foreboding appearance. Not a bad look overall, and I may still do a set like that. But then I thought it might be interesting to try something else: convert the images from scary-swamp to happy-swamp by intensifying the colors and creating high contrast between the water (and the thick, green algae on the water’s surface) and the twisted deadfall throughout the scenes. The result, I think, suggests a greater sense of standing at the edge of the swamp, with the eye tracking from the greens in each foreground to the depths of the swamp and the trees in the backgrounds. The intensified saturation and contrast also brings out many more colors present in the images that weren’t evident in the original photographs.
I included the last four images from the same area just because I liked them. What photographer can resist a colorful clump of fungus (with a big bug in the middle!), some bright red leaves, and an old Ford truck partly buried in the woods?
Select the first image below to begin a slideshow, then skip to the second gallery if you would like to compare the before and after images.
Don’t Bug Me, I’m Just Here for the Coke
If you think the praying mantis is staring at you … it is!
I started compiling a list of praying mantis fun facts to include here, then found the video that I posted after the photos. Couldn’t have done any better than that!
Carefully click any praying mantis face to begin a slideshow…. 🙂
Orchids Collection (Set 4 of 4)
The gallery below contains the fourth (and final!) set of orchid photos I’ve completed for my Flickr Reboot project — using Lightroom and the Nik Collection by DxO to develop and enhance originals taken at the Atlanta Botanical Garden.
I’ve been documenting the project and my workflow using this category: Flickr Reboot.
The previous sets of orchid photos for this project are here:
Orchids Collection (Set 1 of 4)
Orchids Collection (Set 2 of 4)
Orchids Collection (Set 3 of 4)
So what’s next?
I figured out a slightly awkward way to extract file names from Flickr albums, put them in a document to create a text list, then copy and paste the list into Lightroom to filter my photo library. By doing that, I found all 1200 original images and have them organized in Lightroom Collections which I’m consolidating by subject, culling to remove images that I don’t want to rework, and adding some newer photos I took but never processed or posted anywhere. To keep the project interesting, I think I’ll take on subjects of a different kind: photos of Oakland Cemetery (because of the art and architecture of the site, the research I’ve done on its history, and the stories I can tell) or Zoo Atlanta (because … animals!), so I’m going to jazz up a couple dozen examples from these two subjects then decide which one to dive into. Stay Tuned!
Select the first image to begin a slideshow …. thanks!
