Tag: purple

You Can Learn A Lot from A Simple Daisy

On By JohnLeave a comment

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I hope everyone is having a great week.  It’s been a crazy one for me, and I’m just counting the days until the weekend.  I decided to share a simple picture today.  Just a single daisy from the summer.  Actually, this picture is a well cropped version of the original, but I still had enough info in the original to get a decent picture for my efforts. I don’t think it would print too big, but it looks good for the screen.  Hopefully, by next summer, I’ll have a macro lens to avoid that problem.

This picture is the unplanned result of a brief rain shower that left a few water drops on the flower petals.  It was strange because as soon as I noticed them, I realized it was something I wanted to photograph, but I wasn’t all to sure I wanted to put the effort in to the process.  I knew that to do it right, I would need my tripod, and possibly some reflectors, and at the time it seemed like an awful lot of effort that I wasn’t entirely committed to.  However, on the other side of the coin was the possibility of some really nice pictures, and gaining a little experience with a new subject.  I kept going back and forth, and as time went by, those drops on the petals kept calling out to me.  In the end, it was sort of like that guy in Edgar Allen Poe’s, The Tell-Tale Heart, it just got to be too much, and I eventually ran inside for my camera.  I simply couldn’t stand the thought of potentially missing the opportunity for a picture.  Actually, I had a great time trying all kinds of compositions with a few different lenses, and was glad I decided to make the effort.   I just goes to show you that sometimes the biggest problem isn’t what you think it is, but it’s actually just thinking too much instead of doing.  Anyway, I hope you like the shot.  Have a great day, and I’ll see ya all soon!

A Rainbow of Leaves

On By John3 Comments

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Do you like what I did there?  A rainbow of leaves?  It’s true.  If you look hard enough, and use your imagination just a little, you can see the entire ROY G BIV we all once learned about in science class.  Of course,  they were talking about rainbows there, and these leaves are not rainbows, but hopefully you see the artistic slant in all this.  People who see this bush, which has grown in my front yard for the last 20 years, are amazed by what it does in the fall.  Eventually, the leaves will all go to a bright yellow, but they don’t drop.  They just slowly loose their color, and get really thick for the winter.  The cool thing is that they progress through all these different colors first, and almost never in unison, so you wind up with this bizarre looking plant.  I can’t account for the flower in this picture, beyond the fact that it has been unseasonably mild this fall, and perhaps this poor guy got his seasons mixed up.  Sometimes people see one of my pictures of this bush and assume I’ve photoshopped the colors.  That sort of drives me nuts.  I’ll admit to using photoshop, but I don’t manufacture false images unless they are obviously so.  I’m more of the subtle enhancement kind of guy, and almost every picture gets a vignette.

For this picture, I got most of my bang out of the contrast slider in lightroom, and I did make the jump to photoshop for some sharpening, and curves adjustments in the channels.  Back in lightroom, I applied some more sharpening (not sure why) and I’ll admit hitting the vibrance slider a bit, but the base colors are all genuine;  I promise.  Fall continues to progress here in the northeast, but we continue to enjoy a mild run of days.  We have not seen a snow yet that has stuck, and by that I mean accumulate, or at least not melt on contact with the ground.  This has the skiers pulling their hair out, but most everyone else is pretty ok with it.  There have been some heavy frosts lately, and I’ve been fortunate enough to put a few hours together to get out and grab some shots of the frosty landscape.  I look forward to sharing them with you soon.  Have a great day!!!