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.

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.

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Linking up with Photo Friday.

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.

Digital Flowers

Sometimes I think that digital art is more my forte than photography.

When I came across the artificial flowers featured here, the sign in front of them immediately grabbed my attention, so out came my camera. Perhaps it was the poor nature of the lighting, but after my initial attempts at editing, I wasn't too happy with the result.

So I decided to see what else I could do with the picture. After a little experimentation I liked this one a lot better than the original photo.

Suddenly, while writing this post, I realised what I was doing wrong with the original, so it was back to Photoshop, where I finally got a result that I like.

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Linking up with Randomosity.

Orchids

I'm not a big fan of artificial flowers and am rarely tempted to take photos when I see them. In this case, however, the interplay of shadows and reflections made them hard to resist.

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Linking up to Floral Friday Fotos, Photo Friday, Today's Flowers, Weekend Reflections and Shadow Shot Sunday.

Building a Sign

Rather than dig into my archives, today I specifically went out looking for a photo for the weekly meme "Signs, signs". I confess I didn't expect to find anything interesting as I didn't leave myself much time, but I was determined to keep my eyes open just in case something suitable presented itself. As it turns out, today was my lucky day.

We were already sitting down at a restaurant waiting for our dinner when I spotted some activity around a nearby sign. On closer inspection I noticed that these two workers were actually placing the missing letters on the sign in question.

I'm convinced that had I not been looking for a photo of a sign, I wouldn't even have noticed what they were doing.

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Linking up with Signs, signs.