The early morning dew drops highlighted this emerging Lady’s Mantle leaf. This was a gift of nature just waiting to be noticed. It was a beautiful morning!
Emerging: Early Morning Dew
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Emerging: Flowering Plum
Late afternoon sun provided the brilliant illumination of these emerging flowering plum leaves. The blossoms provide the background.
Below is different perspective of the blooms.
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Emerging: Pear Blossom
The lesson that I was exploring as I took this image was from Tony Sweet: “Pick a background and put something interesting in front of it”. The late afternoon sun brilliantly lit up the new spring grass. The blossoms in the pear trees lining our driveway were in partial shade. Normally I try to pick dark backgrounds with light shining on the foreground subject. This time it was just the opposite. I kept a moderate aperture size to blur the background and keep the blossoms in acceptable focus.
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Emerging: New & Old
The emerging new growth of this Exbury Azalea surrounds and seems to protect the old growth from last year. I moved around to get the best position of the old growth between the towering new growth.
Post processing was also simple. I added a little contrast and structure to the leaves as well as darkened the background using NIK Viveza. As a final touch, I lightened the center and darkened the edges with NIK Color Efex Pro.
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Emerging: Wings
Today is the First of May. It is time to appreciate the emerging Spring flora. For the next several posts, I will focus on the emerging buds and blossoms in our back yard. This image caught my eye as I walked by one of our Japanese Maples. It looked like the emerging leaves were wings ready to take off and fly.
For processing, I cropped the image to put the “wings” in the right perspective in relation to the edges. I slightly brightened the center and darkened the background to add a little pop to the leaves.
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Working a Subject #2
Walking around the structure, I saw several areas of pealing paint with interesting patterns. This is one of them. Who thought an old outhouse would be interesting?
I then stuck my head inside the door ….
I gave this image a dose of structure and contrast to give it a grungy look.
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Working a Subject #1
Now that my curiosity was triggered, I moved in for a closer look at the outhouse shown in my last blog. I like to work an image from different perspectives. My eye is attracted to details. They naturally went to these weather and wear beaten boards which made up the stoop leading inside.
I used selective treatments of brightness/contrast layers in Photoshop to highlight and darken the boards and background to provide the contrast that I recall when I took the image. Thanks to Chuck Kimmerle for the tips.
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Seeing New Things
Attached is a blog entry from John Barclay which addresses seeing new things that you would not have shot before.
johnbarclayphotography.com | | Page 3.
By itself, the structure did not capture my interest. However when linked with other “waste” materials, it perked my curiosity. Here is my version. Just a different perspective.
My next couple of posts will include additional details of the outhouse as I worked the image.
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Working in B&W
I am continuously trying to train my eye to see B&W. I find it difficult to see past brilliant color and identify the potential for B&W images. A few days ago, I stepped out our back door and saw these two yellow daffodils brilliantly back-lit by the low morning sun. Was it the color or was it the the brilliance of the back-lit subject that caught my eye ….
The following is the color version.
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Spring is Here … Maybe?
Just when we thought Spring was here, the temperatures dropped to the low 30’s last night. This morning was bright and clear, but “finger numbing” chilly. With the wind blowing, I worked hard to come up with the best compromise between a shutter speed fast enough to freeze the daffodils and a depth of field large enough to get some detail in the background. I was not too successful. But it was still a bright Spring morning shot.
Lesson learned: Sometimes a compromise cannot be reached … move on!