Dodge/Burn and Filters

To play with the dodge and burn tools, I went back to this picture I took up at Green River Reservoir.

 

I didn't want to do anything too obvious, but I wanted to darken the sky and lighten the water to bring them closer to the same brightness. I also lightened up the trees on the left a bit.

 

For my filters, I started with the liquefy filter to make my euphonium from the first week a bit more  Dr. Seuss-ish :) I like the disconcerting contrast between realism and surrealism in this one. 

And here is the solarize filter used to create a photo border - by selecting a rectangular section with the subject of the photo, inverting the selection and then applying the filter.

 

Color Adjustment.

I just came back from a kids birthday party. There was a lot of color there!

This first photo comes from a series of bubble blowing pictures. This one I cropped to just the bubbles in Adobe Lightroom and optimized the white balance, tone (exposure, contrast, highlights/shadows, & whites/blacks), and presence (clarity, vibrance, & saturation) controls to bring out the refraction colors in the soap bubbles.

I've actually been doing basic tonal adjustments like this on most of my pictures throughout the class, so I figured I would try something a bit more extreme for this assignment. So here is another picture from the party I call "Portrait of my son as the young Lord Krishna" :)

I increased the contrast and bumped up the saturation a bit for the picture as a whole and then used Lightroom's Adjustment brush to "paint" my son with a different white balance.

Selection tools and photo editing

This first photo is from a stone wall with a "porthole"in it on the Yestermorrow campus in Warren. Unfortunately, there's really nothing interesting lined up with the hole, so I put some sy begind it from one of my lake photos from last week. While I was playing with positioning I revealed a stripe of the lake at the bottom and decided to keep it that way - I liked the earth/air/water theme. It makes makes the whole think very vexillographic (For readers who aren't as geeky as me - vexillography is the art and practice of designing flags.)

I also like how old-school collagey this ended it. It looks like something I would have done as a teenager in the 90s cutting pictures out of a National Geographic.

This next picture is an experiment with the Adjustment Brush selection tools in Adobe Lightroom. I've used Photoshop for years and am pretty used to  how to do things there, but am really trying to explore Lightroom for this class. This is an attempt to adjust the exposure/levels for the background and subject independently.  In this case, I used this technique to abstract the background while leaving the subject alone. (The subject is the goat that lives in the pasture across the road from our house. My son and I visit him whenever we get the mail.)

Landscapes - Green River Reservoir

This weekend I was camping at Green River Reservoir, so this weeks landscapes are lake pictures. I love taking pictures of lakes - the possibilities that reflection brings to landscapes are a lot of fun to play with.

These first two pictures are all about reflection. They are both from a set taken at dusk from the shore next to our camp site. I waited for the colors to deepen and the lake surface to become still enough for good reflection. (Waiting's often an element of good photography, I'm finding.)

This one features a leaning tree and it's reflection. As the reading mentioned, landscape photography is sometimes about noticing what sticks out in a landscape. In this case, I liked how the diagonal was reinforced by the angle and placement of the clouds.

Here I focused just on the reflection of the clouds. To add in a focal point, I included some wood sticking out of the water. I liked how the texture of the wood contrasted with the water. The water bug (and associated ripples) provides a secondary focus (especially when viewed large).

I liked how this picture looked like a stage set. I did a lot of playing with contrasts between land masses at different distances, though it was hard to really separate them. I think this was one of my better attempts.

This one's all about the clouds! Good clouds can make some pretty exciting landscape photos, certainly. The curve of the shoreline makes it look like the clouds.sky are bulging down against the land a bit too.

This last one introduces a human element. Here's our canoe parked on an island. I took this one because I liked the gradient of color from the bright yellow of the canoe to the reflection of the canoe to the sandy bottom of the shallow water into the darker blues and greens of the deeper water. (I'm thinking about editing out the cloud, though - I find it a little distracting.)