Day 314

Today's wild, wet and windy weather hasn't helped me in my effort to break out of my photo slump. But however frustrating things get, I'm not giving up on this project. Sooner or later I'll find a subject that inspires me, I'll get a shot I'm pleased with, and I'll be enthused all over again.

Marg's roses are starting to die already.

The next shot is of my salad servers. I bought them in Cape Town when I went to South Africa on business in 2006. I love the colours of the beads. Mmm, shiny! :-)

Day 312

Warning: This blog post contains flowers. It may offend those of a macho or insensitive disposition.

As promised yesterday, here are some shots of the roses from Marg's garden. What an exuberant bunch they are!

Hipstamatic shot on the iPhone:

Canon shot with the kit lens:

I'm thrilled to see that the blog passed the 10,000 page view mark last night. Thanks for stopping by! I really appreciate your views and comments.

Day 308

Today's photo is inspired by Lisa Gordon's gorgeous flower shots at Lisa Gordon Photography. In her latest post, she explains how she uses Gaussian blur to achieve a beautifully soft focus effect, so I thought I'd give it a go.

The roses I bought the other day have opened up a lot and are looking beautifully blowsy, although a little wilted around the edges. I set up near a window and used my reflector to bounce light onto the far side of the rose. After cropping the image and adjusting colour balance, brightness and contrast in Lightroom, I opened up the image in Photoshop. I selected the central area of the rose, and inverted the selection. I then used the 'refine edge' tool to feather the selection heavily. Next I applied a Gaussian blur filter. After reopening the image in Lightroom, I 'dreamified' the image even more by reducing the clarity, applying noise reduction, and adding a heavily feathered white vignette.

Thanks for the inspiration, Lisa! :-)

Day 306

When I was at the supermarket today I treated myself to a small bunch of white roses. $5.99 bought me over an hour's fun, shooting and processing. And a cheerful decoration for the house, too, of course!

I'll let you into a little secret: I've got such a habit of knocking things over, I keep vases of flowers in the sink, just in case. Also, I'm not the only member of the household with a propensity for creating chaos. ;-)

Day 151

Today I went on a photo walk round the lake in town, and took over 200 shots (thanks to my new 8GB CF card). Out of those, I got seven that are good enough to keep and share. It doesn't sound like many, but I'm really pleased whenever I get a 'hit rate' of more than 1 per hundred! That's one reason (of many) why digital photography is so great -- amateurs are able to shoot, shoot, shoot and shoot some more the way only professionals could afford to do in the age of film.

Anyway, here are the first few shots from my walk. I'll post the rest tomorrow.

What first attracted me to this rose was its gorgeous yellow colour. So it beats me why this shot has more impact as a sepia tint, but it does. Maybe it's something to do with the raindrops showing up better and the separate petals being more distinct.

I love the patterns made by the native tree ferns. There's something primeval about them; I always half expect to see a diplodocus chewing on a frond!

This cob put on a show for me for about ten minutes. I reckon he must have run away from the circus!