Into the Woods

Into the Woods

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.

The Balloon Seller

A shot from this weekend.

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

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Linking up to Our World Tuesday and Wordless Wednesday.

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.

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

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.

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.

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Linking up to The Weekend in Black and White.

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.