The fraggle report _ faffography edition
Posted on July 23, 2015
I haven’t been on any trips for a couple of weekends now, because of weather and life, but last weekend remembered a couple of years ago Sophie,Mike and I went off to Bellingham to find the Hareshaw Linn waterfall, yet I had not put them up on my smugmug photo site. I went through the old portable HD and found the files, and realised I’d not bothered with them, as the lighting conditions were difficult, and I’d written them off as a pile of shite. I didn’t have Lightroom back then, and PS Elements was OK but I wasn’t that good with it. Of course since then I’ve got LR and PS6 and have watched a heap of Youtube tutorials on how to make things happen, so spent a happy day turning pigs ears into silk purses. Well… maybe not silk, but at least cotton. 🙂 I’ll post the day out later on, but for now I’m just putting up a throwaway shot that I’ve been learning techniques on and (hopefully) improved. I can’t be arsed with all the arguments about altering shots/integrity/leaving things as the camera caught them, because I don’t care, I just wanted to make my picture look better, without altering the mood of the scene I shot.
So here is the original un~faffed with version…
unfaffed sheep shot
which to me looks bland, dark and a bit boring, which is why I had my finger on the delete button.
So I faffed with it, several times, got very frustrated with Potatoshop as it has some daft quirky bits that are hard to get a grip with, but learned a lot along the way. Here is the end result…
faffed
Well I like it better, and think it’s worth keeping 🙂 whaddya think gang?
laters gaters
😉
The Sunday Fraggle Report 18/1
Posted on January 18, 2015
It is so wintery here now, we’re trapped in a cold air bowl apparently because the damned jet stream has shot down the west side of us and then up the east and away, so goodbye to mild temperatures for a week or so. It has been snowing a lot too, but it hasn’t settled where we live, (no snowy pictures 😦 ) though other parts of the country have got a good layering of the white stuff. I haven’t taken many pictures as I haven’t had time while working, it’s been non stop between one client to the next. Phil’s been on holiday this week, doing house jobs and modelling and playing bass. We’ve been to ASDA to do grocery shopping for a trip out haha, but mainly stayed in the warm. On Saturday evening we had Cal for a sleepover, and that was fun as he’s bonkers and funny, and we’ve started watching Breaking Bad which everyone raved about but we missed the first time around. One of Phil’s work chums lent it to him. Well it’s OK, the acting is fine but I don’t get the hype, the plot is downright silly. I’d still rather have The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones any day. Have been getting through a lot of books and can highly recommend Tom Wood and his series of books about an assassin called Victor, Andrew Taylor for his periodic novels and am currently reading The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell, strange and wonderful and really well written. Have spent quite a bit of time redesigning my photo website over on Smug mug as they’ve added a carousel display function,and it’s looking mint, still got loads to do but I like faffing on it’s quite therapeutic and I get to remember my holiday visits and days out with Sophie and Mike on our photography trips. Can’t wait until some warm weather comes along and we can go exploring again. So only a couple of photo’s this week,
fish fingers
and a visitor to the garden today
I’m back
Mr. & Mrs. Robin are back and enjoying my tree of treats. I also had to do some selective colouring for the Sunday Challenge group, am not a fan of this type of processing ( I mean, I don’t get why you would want to), but I suppose it’s ‘Art’ so I had a go.
Selective colour- rainbows
selective colour~ lighthouse
I also managed another polaroid for my SX70 project, and also wasted 3 films in the attempt!
laters gaters 😉
Processing again
Posted on July 3, 2014
I really can’t be arsed to piddle about taking many exposures of the same thing to download into an HDR program as in Photomatix or Nik HDR, most of the time I don’t have a tripod with me anyway, and the whole thing just eats up time when life is too short! I do however like the faux HDR effect that can be got by using Nik color FX pro, which this top photo was faffed on with, not too shabby I think. I use several filters, all manipulatable (that’s not a real word is it?) then pulled into Lightroom for further tweaking to denoise it. In retrospect I should have brought the red’s down a little, but hey ho, next time. 🙂
Original not processed.
with the processing
Processing
Posted on July 1, 2014
I love faffing about with photo’s in Lightroom or Elements, or ‘processing’- which is the technical term. I have the full Nik collection which I like for their Color FX pro and the Analogue settings, but recently sallied forth to Totally Rad and got their Replichrome II slide presets, have had their Replichrome I film presets and like how they work, but am really impressed with the vibrancy of the slide sets, and especially what you can do with the tweak kit. The top image of Sycamore Gap was processed with
ektachrome 64x calibrated+
curve luminous
darken skies ++
vignette lens.
For more on the presets visit Mortal Muses where the cool photographers there give several examples and comparisons with the real thing.
The original shot
Sycamore Gap, unprocessed
Sycamore Gap and Replichrome.
