Day 295

I woke up this morning with a raging sore throat, so I've stayed at home today rather than going on a photo walk. This is the first time I've been ill since Iain left, and I'm really surprised I've made it this long (11 weeks). Like a lot of people, I almost always fall ill straight after an emotional upset.

I decided to have another go at shooting smoke today. I attempted it a few months ago, but I wasn't pleased with the results. I'm happier with what I've managed to get today.

Here's the final image:

This is the original shot, straight out of the camera:

I cropped the image (a square crop worked best for this particular smoke pattern), and then I played around with the contrast slider, blacks slider and tone curve in Lightroom to get the background as dark as I could. I then inverted the image in Photoshop, to give dark smoke against a light background. Finally I brought the image back into Lightroom. I applied the 'purple glasses' preset and tweaked it until I got an effect I liked. Finally, I made the smoke as fluid-looking as possible by reducing the clarity and adding a fair amount of noise reduction.

Day 106

The weather's been wet and miserable all day, so I stayed indoors for today's photo shoot. After my failures and frustrations yesterday, I wanted to have a second stab at some 'action' shots.

Being indoors and not wanting to use artificial lighting meant I could try some long (5-second) exposures and go for the whole motion blur effect, (as suggested by Angie). I decided to take some shots of myself moving into yoga poses. Pookie came to see what I was doing and rolled around on the floor with me, which added to the fun. :-)

I got two shots that I think work okay:

And here's the first shot again, this time as a colour negative.

Day 94

It was a spectacular moonset last night, but I failed to get any decent shots of it, because I don't have a tripod. Even with the shutter wide open and the ISO set to 1600, I was getting shutter speeds of 1/6 of a second, so everything was grainy and very blurry. I think a tripod has just jumped to the top of my photo wish list, ahead of a macro lens.

One good thing about autumn is that you get lots of opportunities to shoot dew, which is something I love. Here are a couple of shots I took this morning.

Can you spot the spider in this first shot?

I think this one looks more interesting as a colour negative.