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.

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Linking up with Skywatch Friday.

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:

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Linking up to Friday Greens, Photo Friday, Scenic Weekends, The Weekend in Black and White and NF Trees n Bushes .

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.

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Linking up to Skywatch Friday.

Fun with Photoshop

Sometimes reality can look quite boring and when it does I often see what I can create in Photoshop. This was one of those cases.

When I saw that tall tree with all the low branches broken off I just knew I had to get a shot. If only it had been in a more interesting spot, or perhaps even if I'd had more time to look for the perfect shot, I might have settled for the real scene. Instead I created something slightly surreal.

I went a bit overboard on my first edit, getting carried away with trying to emphasise the dramatic clouds. Eventually good sense prevailed and I toned it down somewhat.

Even so, I'm not sure I don't like the simplicity of this black and white version better.

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Linking to Scenic Weekends.

The One That Caused All the Trouble

Today I returned to the scene of yesterday's post. I hadn't been there for a few months and was surprised by the changes. All the animals have disappeared and the fence surrounding their home has been taken down. Apparently the owner is planning to build more shops and additional parking there.

For now this is all that remains in that area.

I'm not sure who lives there, but I imagine it's staff quarters. Their home is right beside the overflow parking area, not far from where I parked my car. In fact I was leaning against my car when I took this shot.

And the reason for the title? I took three shots, but when I looked at them, one was virtually black. I checked my camera's exposure settings and they were identical for that photo and one that was perfectly exposed, so there's trouble somewhere. I'm hoping the problem is with my memory card, which I dropped recently, and not with my camera. I'd hate to think that I may be facing the prospect of an expensive camera repair!

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Linking up with The Weekend in Black and White, Black and White View, Through My Lens and Outdoor Wednesday and Skywatch Friday.

Urban Forest

Some people claim that Johannesburg is the world's largest man made forest. In fact there's even a Facebook community celebrating that idea.

Others dispute that a city can be called a forest, but regardless Johannesburg certainly has a lot of trees.

These photos was taken on a sunny summer afternoon in 2014, while I was caught in a traffic jam.

There are masses of these pine trees growing on an island in the middle of the road, separating the traffic going in opposite directions. If you look closely you can just catch a glimpse of some of the cars headed the other way.

Several pedestrians walked past us while the traffic refused to budge.

Sometimes being in a car isn't the quickest way to reach your destination!

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This post is part of Outdoor Wednesday and Friday Greens.