Sunday 31 July 2016

The Meeting

I love the way my fisheye lens manages to squeeze so much into the frame. This was a quick shot I grabbed as I was walking into the room where a bonsai meeting I attended this weekend was being held.


























Linking up with The Weekend in Black and White and Black and White View.

Thursday 28 July 2016

Red Car

While I've been experimenting with editing some of my old photos I discovered a very simple way to do selective desaturation. It doesn't look good for every photo, but I kind of like how this one worked out.



Linking up to Photo Friday.

Wednesday 20 July 2016

Birds on a Street Light

One of the birds commonly seen in my city is the Hadeda, a member of the Ibis family. He's a large bird, and rather noisy, but I've learned to appreciate his presence because his diet includes a nasty creature commonly referred to as a Parktown Prawn - one of the few bugs that really frightens me.

In the past I've taken a few photos of these birds walking around on the ground, but recently I've become aware of their liking for perching on street lights, and I've been longing to get a photo of them up there.

Today the opportunity finally presented itself to me.

Once again, I've opted for a dark black and white edit.



Linking up with Wordless Wednesdays and Wild Bird Wednesday.

Monday 18 July 2016

Another Moth

I finally finished the job of moving my bonsai blog to its new domain last night, but in the process I've been neglecting this one. Although I suffer terribly from writer's block, I'd be lying if I said that the problem was entirely a lack of inspiration. I can be terribly lazy too.

But even when I'm struggling for ideas, old photos are in plentiful supply, so I figured I might as well share another moth. This one wasn't quite as spectacular as the Big Brown Moth that I shared back in May, and if memory serves me correctly it was a lot smaller, but I like the way this photo came out too.




Thursday 14 July 2016

Weeds in Black and White

Lately I find that I can't stay away from black and white when editing my photos.

This was a photo of some weeds I shot a while back. The flowers were actually yellow, but they stand out against the background so much better this way.


If you click on the photo to see a larger version you may be able to see that the flower on the left was covered with ants.


Linking up with Floral Friday Fotos and Saturday Show Off.

Wednesday 13 July 2016

Fantasy Island

Many of the photos I've edited for this blog so far have created illusions while still bearing some resemblance to reality. Today I went for something totally different.

The "island" in this image is actually part of a leaf.




Tuesday 12 July 2016

Looking for Inspiration

It was never part of my plans to spend a large chunk of the day watching YouTube videos, but after stumbling across one entitled How Do I Develop My Own Style? I just got carried away as the suggestions for interesting photography videos were all so interesting.

Finally I got dragged into some really quirky stuff involving double exposures and prism use to create some really interesting effects in camera.

It was at that stage that I was reminded of this photo I took way back in 2014.


Despite appearances to the contrary, the only editing I did on this photo was a quick black and white conversion. And no, it wasn't a double exposure! I actually used a multi-image filter screwed into the front of my lens.

It's been a while since I've done anything like this, but perhaps all those videos have been the wake-up call I needed to push myself a bit harder in creating some really wacky photos.


Linking up to Wordless Wednesday.

Monday 11 July 2016

Grasshopper Noir

I've been procrastinating horribly with moving the last of my bonsai posts to their new domain, but over the last couple of days I've decided to get the work finished once and for all so that I can turn my attention to working on my trees and writing new posts.

What's been slowing me down is the need to change the watermarks on my photos. While working on that a little while ago, I decided to experiment with the photo I used in a post titled A Visitor to the Bonsai Garden.

The post is about a beautiful grasshopper that I discovered on one of my trees a few months ago. He was quite the most colourful grasshopper I've ever seen, and yet when I opened that photo today I couldn't help wondering what it would look like in Noir.


I really liked the result, but I felt it was a little too quirky for that blog. If you'd like to see what he looks like in colour, you can see him there. There's a video too!


Linking up with Nature NotesBlack and White View and The Weekend in Black and White.

Saturday 9 July 2016

The Wimbledon Beanie

I tend to watch a lot more television than is good for me, but I try to use my viewing time constructively by knitting while I watch.

Lately I've been knitting a lot of beanies for charity. I like to vary them a bit to keep from getting bored, but I also need to keep it simple so that I don't need to look at what I'm doing.

This is one I completed a couple of days ago.


I call it the Wimbledon Beanie because of the colour scheme. Had I not been watching the tennis when I started this one, I doubt I'd have put green and purple together.

I was really pleased to get the spiral effect with very little effort, so I thought I'd share the stitch for anyone who's interested in making a similar beanie for themselves.

As I work on a circular knitting needle to avoid sewing (my pet hate), all rows are knit.

Circular needles available at Amazon
http://amzn.to/29vFTWq

Row 1,3,5: using purple - knit
Row 2: using green - *knit 2, slip 1 purlwise*, repeat until last stitch, knit 1
Row 4: using green - knit 1, *slip 1 purlwise, knit 2*, repeat to end
Row 6: using green - *slip 1 purlwise, knit 2*, repeat until last stitch, slip 1 purlwise

My basic beanie pattern is pretty straightforward. In this case I used double knit wool and a 7.5mm needle, so I cast on 70 stitches, but I vary the number of stitches based on what thickness of wool and needles I'm using. When going for the spiral effect, the important thing for a seamless transition between rows is that the number of stitches should be a multiple of 3 + 1.

I don't recommend using chunky wool for this pattern though as I tried it and the spiral effect got lost.

I started out with 6 rows of rib (knit 1, purl 1) before changing to the pattern. The number of stitches remains constant until I reach the required length - approximately 20cm (just under 8 inches). My only shaping is one decrease row: *knit 2 together*, repeat to end.

I don't cast off, but simply cut the wool, leaving a long enough tail to pull through all the stitches. I then knot the end and sew a few inches of the remaining wool into the wrong side to prevent the knot from coming undone.

And that's it.


Linking up with Nifty Thrifty Sunday.

Friday 8 July 2016

A New Direction

When I started this blog my intention was to share a photo every day.

As I can sometimes go days at a time without taking any photos, this meant that I would often need to go digging into my archives for interesting shots, then editing them to look their best here. Some days it was fun, others it just felt like hard work. Committing to doing something every day regardless of whether I could spare the time or not was clearly a mistake.

At the same time I sometimes feel that I want to write about things that aren't related to my photos. As I already have a second blog focusing on my bonsai trees, I didn't want to commit to any more.

For a while I toyed with the idea of giving up on this blog and starting a new one from scratch, but I felt that doing so would be wasting the time and effort I'd already put into this one. I actually quite like some of my posts though there are a few that I may delete in time.

This post marks a new direction for my blog, and with it a new name. I'll try to keep it quirky :)



Linking up with The Ultimate Rabbit Hole and The Weekend in Black and White.

Wednesday 6 July 2016

The Ceiling

I've been having fun playing with my fish-eye converter this week. I love the way it turns this ceiling into something almost abstract.


Tuesday 5 July 2016

The Balloon Seller

A shot from this weekend.

That lady had a lot of balloons for sale. Too bad nobody seemed to want one.



Linking up to Our World Tuesday and Wordless Wednesday.

Monday 4 July 2016

What the Camera Saw

As my focus at the moment is on shooting photos for the theme "Noir" (black) with the aim of using one specific editing process to keep the style constant, I've decided there isn't much point in setting my camera to shoot in black and white right now.

Instead I've been using the "Dramatic Tone" setting I mentioned previously. In the right conditions it really can produce magical results, as was the case with this photo - a fair reflection of the scene I saw yesterday.

"Dramatic Tone" version straight out of camera

Cameras don't usually cope too well with contrasty light though, and without that setting I'd have been left with this image, which is what the camera actually saw:

Unedited RAW photos - what the camera saw

Starting with that version it would have taken a lot of editing to get anything close to what I was after.

Of course neither of those was the look I wanted for my final image. Taking both into Photoshop and applying the same editing methods produced two dramatically different images.

The version created from the RAW original ended up really dark with far too much detail lost in the shadows.


The "Dramatic Tone" version, on the other hand, produced just the look I was after with only minimal editing.



Linking up to Through My Lens and Black and White View.

Sunday 3 July 2016

Black Light

These dark images seem to have taken over this week. I guess the overall darkness does make the light stand out in this one.


Saturday 2 July 2016

Proteas


 I've gone a bit weird with my editing today. Who would have thought it was possible to make proteas look sinister? Yet I think that's what's happened here.

I'm sure that these won't be to everyone's liking but I've often found my photos drifting towards the dark side.









I've been considering doing a project called SoFoBoMo for a while now, but I was a bit baffled as to what theme I should use. The more time I spend editing photos, the more I feel that I should make my theme "Noir" - French for black, possibly focusing on mundane objects.










Linking up to The Weekend in Black and White.

Friday 1 July 2016

Keeping My Options Open

Unedited RAW
I've mentioned previously that I enjoy using a high contrast black and white setting on my camera. When I'm not using that one, another favourite is one that Olympus calls "Dramatic Tones". It's similar to an HDR (high dynamic range) effect but sometimes adds some strange highlights or dark spots which aren't always pleasing. But I always have a RAW version as back-up in case things go wrong.

In the case of this palm tree that I shot a few months ago, the unedited RAW version looks really dull.


Dramatic Tones - as shot









On the other hand the Dramatic Tones shot has produced some halos around the tree combined with a few really dark patches in the sky.













With a lot of experimentation in Photoshop, I came up with something a bit more natural though I'm still not entirely happy with the result.

Edited in Photoshop

Dramatic Tones converted to sepia


Once I was done with colour I decided to try some sepia conversions.

The version created from the Dramatic Tones original produced an interesting, though rather dark, result.



Photoshop edit converted to sepia















Converting the version created in Photoshop produced a much lighter tree.








I'm really not sure which I like better.


Linking up with Photo Friday.

Thursday 30 June 2016

The World is Round

I love to show a world that is different from reality and one of my favourite ways of distorting it is using a fish-eye lens. When shooting at the sky however, lighting issues come into play and I've been playing around with this photo for a couple of days trying to get a natural looking version. Somehow I can't seem to get it quite right.

In the end, as is so often the case, I preferred the result in black and white.





Linking up with Skywatch Friday.

Wednesday 29 June 2016

The Swimming Pool



This photo was taken with a fish-eye converter on the front of my lens. No distortion was added in Photoshop.

It was a hot summer day but the sky was grey, typical of summer afternoons in Johannesburg. The weather can change from bright sunshine to heavy cloud and thunderstorms really quickly. Somehow the colour version of this photo didn't really convey the weather on that day so I went for a moody black and white conversion.


Linking to Wednesday Water.

Tuesday 28 June 2016

Waiting in the Shadows




I loved the play of shadows on the wall here, but without the man the scene was not complete.


Linking up to Our World TuesdayWordless Wednesdays and Shadow Shot Sundays.

Monday 27 June 2016

No Left Turn

I've always had a fascination with quirky signs and have a few old photos of them stored somewhere on my computer. The one in this photo, taken a few days ago wasn't quirky in its own right, but that sign does seem rather out of place.



Linking up to Signs, Signs.

Sunday 26 June 2016

Chilli Flower

I'm still hard at work moving my bonsai blog to it's new domain and, while working with the photos I need for it, I came across this shot of a chilli flower which I used in a post I first published in early January this year.



I was very excited by this little flower, which was the first one on a seedling that I'd acquired a few months before. It was really tiny - about the size of my thumbnail, and I found it quite difficult to get a decent photo.

When I'd done editing it for my bonsai blog, I spent a little time playing with it in Photoshop and created a couple of semi-abstract flower shots.


This first one isn't too different from the reality, but the second one is much more abstract, though still recognisable as a flower.


By contrast to these, a lot of the images I create from my photos bear no resemblance to the photos I started out with.


Linking up with Saturday Show Off and Macro Monday 2.

Saturday 25 June 2016

Growing in the strangest places

Plants seem to spring up in the strangest places. I discovered this little weed growing in a hollow in the trunk of a palm tree and couldn't resist stopping to take a photo.


Perhaps it's my love of bonsai that has made me look out for this kind of thing.

Friday 24 June 2016

Birds on the Roof

For some unknown reason these birds seem to love congregating on the roof of my neighbour's house but they never visit us. Instead we're often visited by a couple of larger birds.

Both photos were taken at about the same time, but different editing techniques lead to very different moods.



Linking to The Weeekend in Black and White and The Bird D'Pot, Camera Critters, Nature Notes and Saturday's Critters.

Thursday 23 June 2016

The Back Alley


This is a narrow alley in which I parked my car while I went shopping at a local supermarket today. The photo looks a lot better than the reality.

Wednesday 22 June 2016

Through the Window


Nothing much to say about this one really. I loved the shadows on the shiny floor.

This is another of those photos taken in really tricky lighting, necessitating some heavy editing to bring out enough detail both inside the building and outdoors.


Linking to Shadow Shot Sunday.

Tuesday 21 June 2016

Night

Yesterday's photo showed a street scene with a building site in the background. At the end of the post I remarked on the fact that the photo made me realise just how fast my city was changing.

Driving past that corner this evening I suddenly remembered that I'd taken a shot there earlier this month, so I thought I'd show you what is standing there now.


I've become so accustomed to seeing that building that I'd forgotten that it wasn't there in 2014.


Linking up to Our World Tuesday and Wordless Wednesday.

Monday 20 June 2016

Why I like to shoot in colour

As I said in a previous post, I often shoot using a  high contrast black and white setting, but I always make sure to use RAW + jpg so that I have a colour version available as well. Although it gives me a rough idea of what the scene will look like, sometimes that high contrast setting just doesn't give the best result and then I go back to Photoshop to improve on the result.

This photo was one such case.


The high contrast version lost a lot of detail from the sky, so I tried several different edits in both black and white and colour and this was one of my favourites.

Before I started using a digital camera I occasionally experimented with black and white, but not often because film was expensive and it wasn't possible to switch back to using colour until the film was finished. However one thing I learnt back then was that putting a colour filter in front of the lens could dramatically change the resulting photo. Sadly there was no screen to show the result, so if I got it wrong, that was then end of it.

In the days of digital, shooting colour allows one to add that colour filter during the editing process, so here are a couple of different edits, showing just how much difference they can make.

First the infra-red filter, which darkened the blue sky and made the green in the trees look lighter and brighter.



And then the one that I'm not really too keen on, but had to show for comparison. The blue filter turned the sky really pale, with the clouds and crane becoming far less conspicuous, while the trees are now much too dark.


Finally a word on the photo itself. Looking at this photo which was taken a little over two years ago makes me realise just how fast my city is changing. There is now a big building standing on that spot. But there is still a lot of construction going on all over Johannesburg.


Linking up with Through My Lens and Black and White View.

Sunday 19 June 2016

Rhythm of Light

This isn't really the photo I'd hoped to use for a Sunday post, but after spending four hours without power this afternoon I just knew that I had to use a photo of light.


In purely selfish terms I was feeling really frustrated when it got close to 5:00 pm and we still didn't have power. It wouldn't be so serious in summer, but at this time of year it's almost dark by 5:30 and I really hate to be left in the dark.

But when things like this happen I try to remind myself that there are still poor people who never have access to power. Instead of thinking about my own minor problem, I should be thinking about all the homeless people who will be sleeping on the streets on this cold winter night.

Saturday 18 June 2016

Shadow Bonsai

After my last couple of posts you'd be forgiven for thinking this was another photo which involved heavy editing, but this one is actually pretty close to what my camera saw.

I enjoy shooting using a high contrast black and white setting, though my camera is always set to shoot RAW + jpg, which means that I always have a colour version to go back to when the contrast is too extreme. In this case I liked the way it turned out, so all that was required was a little sharpening.

This is a shadow of one of my bonsai trees on a rather worn cement floor.



Linking up with Shadow Shot Sunday.

Friday 17 June 2016

One Photo- Four Moods

Once again I've been playing with Photoshop.

The photo I selected was a very ordinary photo of some trees, taken on a late summer's day a couple of years ago.

First the dreamy version:


Next something resembling autumn:


A high-key black and white conversion transforms summer into winter:


And a much darker conversion makes the woods look like the kind of place you'd want to stay far away from:



Linking up to Friday Greens, Photo FridayScenic WeekendsThe Weekend in Black and White and NF Trees n Bushes .

Thursday 16 June 2016

Bringing Out the Sunbeams

I don't often show unedited photos, but this post is about editing, so I'm forced to make an exception to my rule.

A couple of years ago I took a photo of a beautiful sky full of clouds with a few sunbeams bursting through. I was really disappointed with the result. My camera tried its best to expose the scene correctly but there was simply too much contrast for it to see what I had seen.

The unedited original

Back then I tried to edit the scene to enhance those sunbeams, but in the process the landscape turned to a silhouette.



I like a good silhouette, but I wasn't particularly happy with this one.

I gave up after that because I didn't know how to fix it.

Last night I decided to have another go at editing that photo.

With the help of some recently acquired Photoshop plug-ins, I was amazed at the detail I was able to recover.


I still wasn't totally happy though. I'd now created something that was much brighter than what I'd seen that day. So this morning it was back to Photoshop to try again.


I think that's about as close as I'm going to get to reality.

Finally I decided to see what it looked like in black and white.



Linking up to Skywatch Friday.