WildOats

You get what you pay for. Ever hear that? Well I had a visual aid for that little pearl of wisdom this week. I bought a flower arrangement earlier in the week. I wanted to snap some more pics, but the store didn’t have much to pick from. So I made due and just bought something to appease myself.

Well one of the main reasons I bought this particular arrangement was for what appeared to be a sunflower. I wanted that because I figured it would be a nice size and reproduce well in a picture. Come to find out when I get the arrangement home, it wasn’t a real sunflower. And it wasn’t really opened up too much. But I figured it would open up as the week went on. Sounds good in theory….but in practice….not so much.

The pseudo-sunflower never really opened up much, and on top of that the yellow petals were withering up and falling off. It looked like the thing was stunned or something, and never got any better. In fact, the thing just got worse as the week went on.

I decided to make due(again!!). I picked off the dead petals and thought…..what the hell. Give it a try and see what you can come up with. So I set the thing up next to my window. It was challenging because of all the limitations. There was a huge chunk of the flower missing after I pulled a lot of the petals off. Then the petals that were left weren’t the best looking either. So I had to arrange the thing in such a way, as to maximize what I got.

Here’s the first shot I got.

On a bigger pic you can really see the fuzz on the stem and stuff. It came out pretty sharp.

The next shot was more of a close up. But not too close!!

Despite all the struggles from this shoot, I guess I’m happy with the results.

Went back to the store to look for some more flowers to photograph. As I said before the variety is pretty poor. All the flowers and arrangements they had, were repeats. Nothing new that grabbed me at all. Still I wanted to get something to practice on. So I stood there looking. I must have given off that deer in the headlights feeling to the people as they passed by me.

I finally settled on this one arrangement. It had what looked like a small sunflower kind of thing. I figured that would be a big enough, and I haven’t shot that before. The arrangement also had some yellow daisy kind of things. I shot those already, so that didn’t thrill me, and also some roses. I haven’t shot roses yet either, so I thought this would be my best bet.

When I got the bouquet home, I realized the sun flower thing is not a real sunflower. It was also not really opened up too much. So I decided to wait a few days and hope that it would open up more and look better. I then fell back to the roses. I hadn’t shot roses in my apartment yet, so at least that would be ’something’ new.

The thing with the roses turned out to be positioning. When I put them into the vase they would position themselves the way they wanted to be. Of course, their way, was not at all what I wanted. I had to put stuff in the vase to position them. It took some finagling but I finally got them to stay put.

Anyway, here’s a sample of my efforts today.

As you know I’ve been trying to get a handle on Photoshop Elements. I bought a book on it, and have been reading it this weekend. The more I read, the more impressed I become with the software. I does a lot of cool things. I’m still just in the beginning stages, so I’m trying to get the basics down.

Today I was reading up on exposure. There are a few tricks they talk about that interested me. So I decided to see how they would work. The results were very nice I have to say.

I went and retrieved some pics from the trash that I threw out. The exposure was too far off to try to save them. So I thought these would be good to use to see how Elements would do with them.

This is the pic I decided to try. It is right out of the camera.

See how dark it is? The cameras meter got fooled by the patch or brightness behind the squirrel, and then under exposed the squirrel.

I imported the pic into Elements and tried using the tricks the book talked about. The first trick was using what they call a screen layer. Not sure how it works exactly, but it lightens the entire picture. It lightens everything. It lightens the shadows and the highlights. I did that twice on two separate layers. Then I also tried using the shadows/highlights adjustment. This works a little differently. There are two separate sliders. One for shadows and one for highlights. This gives you some more freedom. So I lightened the shadows a bit. Then they give you a highlights slider. So I darkened them a bit. I boosted the contrast a little after that.

Here’s what I came up with.

Overall, I think Elements did a pretty good job. A big improvement from what I got right out of the camera.

Last time I conducted an experiment to see if I really needed the tracing paper over my windows and that reflector. Turns out….. I did. So today I went back to the drawing board and did things the correct way.

I tapped the windows up with tracing paper. I set up my pink tulip, and also used the white paper as a reflector. When you put the tracing paper over the windows, it does cut down on the amount of light that comes in. But the light that does come in is more diffuse and more even. It cuts down on having areas that are too bright, and areas that are too dark. That does still happen, but it’s at least a little better. Then the reflector helps by lightening the dark shadows, and things look better.

So back to the tulip. I placed it into a vase, and played around with positioning it. I finally got a composition that I liked and I took some shots. Here’s an example of what I was getting.

I think something gets lost in the translation when I shrink the size of the pics. I guess since it’s smaller you don’t get to see the detail of the shot. But anyway this is what I was getting. I was much happier with these shots today. Much more even lighting. There is light and dark, so it’s not too flat. I liked the color I was getting in the pink-purples. I liked the whites too. They were white, but they weren’t blown out. There was still detail in them. I think it looks a lot better. What do you think?

Not really sure what’s been going on with the weather lately. They had tornadoes up north. Fires in California. We’re having fires here in Florida too. Rain storms in the northeast. Then there was an earthquake in China. Seems mother nature is not too happy.

Closer to home, and on a less serious front, I’ve been battling my nemesis also. You guessed it, the wind has returned to south Florida. I’ve been going out for my walks, but this wind is relentless. I haven’t had much luck shooting pics outside. So I went back to the store to buy some more flowers, figuring at least I’ll be able to shoot those.

I was looking over some of the bouquets they had. There wasn’t much to pick from. I’ve already shot some flowers before, and didn’t want to buy the same ones again. It seems they buy the same types of flowers over and over again. Another thing is, you have to be careful what type of flowers you want to photograph. Little tiny ones will just look tiny in the picture. Also you have to be careful of the colors you pick. Sometimes reds come out too saturated and it looks funny in the final product. I finally settled on tulips.

I picked pink tulips. They were a decent size so they wouldn’t be tiny specs on the pic. The color wasn’t too saturated, I was hoping it would look ok in the photos. They also had these small yellow stamens in the center to off set the pink.

So I set up my little stand next to the window and started my shoot. This time I didn’t bother taping the windows over with the tracing paper. I wanted to see if it made a difference or not. I also didn’t bother with the white piece of paper opposite the windows to reflect light. I took the pics, and uploaded them onto the computer.

Upon seeing the full size pics, I learned that I should have tapped the windows up with my tracing paper, and used the white reflector. The light was too harsh I think. The highlights were too bright, and the shadows were too dark. I guess it’s good to have a visual example to see why you have to do some things to get better results. Next time I’ll be going back to my usual set up.

Here’s an example of what I was getting.

Overall not aweful. But you can see how the white part to the left is brighter than what I would have liked. Also I think the green of the leaves is too bright. Meanwhile I would have liked more light in the darker part of the flower on the right. Oh well…..live and learn.

After reading up on Elements and playing around a bit, I think I’m starting to pick up a few things. There’s still a whole bunch of stuff I have NO idea how to work, but I’m learning the basics. It’ll take me a while, but I think I’ll get it.

Today I decided to try my hand at a little photo editing and see how it would turn out. I didn’t feel up to making huge radical changes, but I wanted to learn a bit more. Last time I adjusted the color saturation a little, and straightened things up a bit.

This time I picked a photo that I wanted to do something new on. I wanted to try the clone stamp tool. I think that’s what they call it. Anyway, here’s the pic right out of the camera.

The reason I took the pic was because I liked the back lighting of it. I liked how the yellow flower was glowing. I was also using a 300mm lens at the time, and that allowed me to blur the background out. That way the flower was even more isolated, and stood out from the background.

The challenge while taking this pic was to get it in focus. For one thing, the wind was blowing, AGAIN (who knew?) but also I was using a bigger lens and a setting to have a shallow depth of focus to blur the background. But when you do that, less of the pic is in focus, and I didn’t want the flower to blur too much. So with all that on my mind, and with the sun in my face, and then timing my shot between wind gusts, the above pic is what I managed to get.

Overall I’m pretty happy with it. The exposure is pretty good. The flower is in ok focus. The background is all out of focus, which is what I was really trying to accomplish. But what I don’t like is that I have a small dust spot in the upper left of the pic, and I also don’t like the branch on the lower right.

Well I imported the pic into Elements and started to work on it. I adjusted the saturation a bit, I added some contrast and lightened some. Then I started to play with the clone tool. It actually works pretty well. You have to fool around with it, but it does do a nice job. Here’s what I came up with.

I think it looks much cleaner. I removed the dust spot on the left, I got rid of the distracting branch to the right. I think it helps the pic a lot. So which do you prefer photo 1 or 2?

Well I’m still playing with Elements, trying to figure out how it works. I think most of it will wind up being more than what I need. But it’s nice to know that I have the ability to grow and use more and more of the program as I get used to it.

The program has a lot of capabilities. But I mostly need something to just get my pics off my camera and onto my computer. Then be able to tweak them a bit and get them to look a little better. All the fancy stuff, is really more than I need. But like I said, it’s nice to know I have it in case I might need it.

In the mean time I’ve been playing with Elements and having a fun time with it. I have a picture here that I’ll use to show you what I really need and can use. The picture is from a trip I took about a year ago now. I went to California and and took some pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge. So first I’ll show you the picture straight out of the camera. I took the picture with my little point and shoot. It was shot in JPG, nothing fancy.

This picture was taken with my little point and shoot. It doesn’t have a big zoom capacity, so this was the best I could do. I used the flowers in the foreground for interest. Overall, not a great photo, but not too bad.

Then I took the same picture and played with it in Elements. I didn’t use any of the crazy effects, just a little tweaking and came up with this.

I basically just boosted the color saturation a little. I also straightened the bridge a bit. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if you’re holding the camera straight. In the first picture you can see the bridge is a little off. Sometimes it’s you not holding the camera straight, but sometimes it could also be lens distortion throwing things off. In this case I think it was me….hehe. I also lightened the shadows a bit under the bridge.

Anyway, overall I think I like the tweaked picture better. What do you think?

Haven’t been doing much with my photography for a little bit now. I’ve been busy reading up on how to use Photoshop Elements. I bought the program a few weeks ago, and have been learning how to use it. It’s a big program, and it does a lot. So I’ve been trying to get a handle on it.

Up till now I’ve been using iPhoto that came with my mac. iPhoto is a pretty good program, it does the basic photo editing things well. I’ve been using it for about 2 years and have been happy with it. But I wanted to have some more control over my shots, and also to be able to do some more advanced processing.

Photoshop Elements has a lot more capability. It not only does the basic photo editing tricks that iPhoto does, but it also does a whole lot more. It’s really very impressive to see what it can do. I’m happy with the purchase.

I have an example of a picture I took, and then processed in Elements. It’s a pink daisy type of flower. I set the flower up next to my window. On the window I taped tracing paper to diffuse the light. I then used a white piece of paper under the flower and also set up more white paper opposite the window. The paper was used to reflect light back unto the flower and try to reduce the amount of shadows. I set my camera up on a tripod, to steady it. I then played with the composition. I kept positioning the flower and looked through the view finder, until I was happy with it. Here’s what I came up with.

I added a bit of water to the flower for interest. I think it also removes any dust the flower my have and increases the saturation of the color a bit.

I then uploaded the picture to my mac, and fooled around with it in Elements. I think it does a nice job. What do you think of it?

Well the weekend came and went again. Amazing how the weekends go by so quickly, yet the week days take forever to get through. Sometimes I swear it feels like I fall asleep on Friday night and wake up Monday morning. Only to re-start yet another week again.

I usually don’t have much planned for weekends. I like to keep it simple, and not have a hectic time of it. I also love to sleep in. After having a long week of waking up early, I love to be able to sleep in on the weekends. You always feel better after catching up on some sleep.

This weekend I had a great surprise. Chuck called and we chatted for a while. Then he asked me what I had planned. And I said not much. I like to keep the weekends simple. It was then that he asked if I would like some company in a few hours. I was way excited. I have been asking Chuck and Tim to come back with me to my place for a long time now. But up till now they haven’t been to my place yet. And now……they were finally coming over. How cool is that?

Well sure enough a few hours later Chuck, Tim and Stone arrived. I also got to see their new car. It’s really nice. It all clean and shinny. It’s a dark gray color, and looks awesome. Drives real smoothly too. They did a great job picking it out.

The puppy was soooo cute. He was all excited about all the new stuff he was able to sniff. He walked around and was checking everything out. Then he finally tired himself out and took a nap. The little cutie.

All in all it was a fun time. I was excited to finally have Chuck and Tim over. They’ve been welcoming me to their home for a while now, so it was nice to have them here and return the favor. Can’t wait for you guys to come over again. You guys are always welcome.

Last week I had the great fortune to receive my very first piece of original fine art. How awesome is that!!!! As everyone knows, Chuck is a great artist. He draws and paints and sketches and really is very talented. Well he surprised me with something that he painted just for me. A custom piece just for me. Is there anything cooler than that?

I was sooooo excited about it. It’s an underwater scene of fishies swimming around. It’s on 3 pieces of canvas and looks awesome. It’s three individual pieces that come together to make one scene. The colors on it are beautiful. It’s full of blues which I love, greens and reds. It’s very colorful, and the colors change as the light that falls on it changes. It’s really a beautiful piece.

I haven’t had a chance to install it yet. But I think I’m putting it up in my bedroom. I have to decide how I want to frame it and stuff. But I’m soooo excited with it. Chuck really knew what to paint for me, and I’m soooo happy with it.

Here’s a picture of it.

The photo really doesn’t do it justice. You HAVE to see it in real life to appreciate it. There’s a lot of detail to it, and all the variations to the colors used. Just shows you how talented Chuck really is.

Thank you sooooo much for this beautiful piece of art Chuck. I LOVE it. I appreciate it more than you’ll ever know. Thank You.