Day 318

Today I spent yet another photo break photographing weeds. This time a couple of dandelions drew my attention: one flower, and one seed head. They reminded me of the Sun and the Moon, and I processed the images with this idea in mind.

Dandelion Sun:



Dandelion Moon:

Here's the dandelion flower again, this time as a colour negative. I like the background in this one. It looks like party streamers.

Day 317

Please excuse the weird formatting in places in this post. Blogger has decided that 'what you see is not what you get' -- everything looks fine when I'm editing it, and then it changes when I publish it.

Living, as I do, in the middle of an empty field, with nothing but grass, weeds and cow pats around me, it's easy to think, 'Oh, there's nothing to photograph here'. But if I make an effort to look really carefully, I'm always amazed by the variety of subjects all around.

For example, there's a big clump of what I think might be sedge growing next to the water tanks. The sedge (or whatever it is) has recently sprouted flower heads, and although the flowers don't look much from a distance, close up they're really pretty.

The sedge (?)

I found a flower head with an interesting shape which I could photograph from an angle that would give me a relatively plain and unfussy background. As the sun was strong, I used my diffuser to soften the light. I knew I'd be blowing the image up a lot, so I used as low an ISO as possible, to reduce the amount of graininess. It was pretty windy, and the sedge was moving about all over the place, so I needed a fast shutter speed. In order to get that with a low ISO, I had to use a large (low) aperture. This wasn't a problem, as it would give a nice blurry background and if not all of the flower was in focus it would add to the 'macro look' of the final image.

Here's the image that I took, as it looked straight out of the camera. This is as close as my lens would let me focus.

SOOC

After cropping the image and adjusting the white balance in Lightroom, I erased the upper part of the stem in Photoshop using the clone tool, and then bumped up the brightness and contrast. I also increased up the saturation selectively (reds only) to make the centre of each flower stand out. I then blurred the out of focus areas and sharpened the in-focus areas in order make the distinction between the two more dramatic. Finally, I imported the image back into Lightroom and added some noise reduction.

The finished image

I'm really drawn to macro photography, and as soon as the house has sold I'm going to treat myself to a macro lens!

Day 272

It's been raining all day, and the forecast is promising rain for the next ten days. I shall have to start getting inventive with my photo breaks! If anyone's got any suggestions of good subjects to shoot indoors, I'd love to hear them - I have no idea what I'm going to do! Today I popped outside for five minutes and took some photos of raindrops on the grass.

I got three shots that were worth keeping, and I decided to process them all differently. The third one was a shot of some grass leaves similar to the second shot, but then I noticed the little fly during processing, and I decided to zoom in on him. This is really pushing my 18-55mm kit lens to its very limit. One day I will get that macro lens.

Day 240

I reckon this must be the first dandelion seed head of the season. This is as close as I can get with any of my lenses. I'd love to be able to get a macro shot one day.

There was a large flock of birds on these wires, but by the time I managed to get my camera ready to take the shot, only one was left!

Days 183-186

Our internet connection has been down for the past 72 hours, but it's just come back up, so I'm rushing to put this post together as quickly as I can, in case the connection goes down again!

Here are my 365 photos from the last few days:

Day 183

The official halfway point of the project. I came up with an idea of half a clock, to mark 'half time'.

Day 184

How to shoot cows who aren't used to you and run off when you approach: lie down in the grass and wait for them to come to investigate you!

Day 185

Clover in the wind

The Scream (of frustration at being without the internet)

Day 186

Some colour to brighten up a wet, grey day

And here are a couple of experiments I did with the 100 Cameras in 1 app on the iPad. I put them up on Flickr a few days ago, and was thrilled when the creator of the app, Trey Ratcliff, commented on the second image.

Day 177

I really lucked out yesterday, with the shots of the tree heart and the dilapidated outhouse. In contrast, today's photo shoot didn't go very well. I wanted to shoot the gerberas in daylight before they wilt, but the light wasn't good and I couldn't get anything interesting happening with the composition either. Not having enough time for a second shooting session, I had to resort to trying to liven up the two least crappy shots in Lightroom. I would have been more than satisfied to have got results like this at the beginning of this project, but now I'm not. Which is good.

Day 172

Our neighbours put some more cattle on our land today. Here's one of them saying hello to the welcoming committee from the next paddock.

Dead thistle heads

And here are a couple more shots from my photo walk the other day.

I snapped this leaf just as the wind got underneath it and lifted it up.

Another gull. It's a bit static as the gull's not doing anything, but I like the compositional lines of the post and the boardwalk.