I took an afternoon and went to Cameron Park. Jacob’s Ladder is a long stair that goes from the upper park area to the riverfront.
Cameron Park Clubhouse is a pavilion that can be rented for various functions.
I had the pleasure of spending a week in Seattle recently and was able to take lots of pictures.
This one shows their ferris wheel and the football and baseball stadiums.
This one is looking towards downtown from the top of the space needle.
This is the ferry across Puget Sound.
Another image of mine received a second place in the Associate’s category of the Heart of Texas Professional Photographers Guild image competition on February 11. This is the original version.
However, in order to improve it for competition, I removed some of the distracting elements. The speaker, Mark McCall did a critique of all the images and suggested a couple of small additional changes. He also said that images should always have a border. So, that said, this is the final version of the image.
I entered this image into the January Heart of Texas Professional Photographers’ Guild image contest. I took second place in the Associate Member category.
Additionally, I received notification from ViewBug. They have a system of tallying the comments and responses and then produce a year-end summary. They said I scored in the top 20% of all users on their site.
While looking out the window, I noticed how the sun was shining on an oak leaf and thought it might make an interesting picture.
I used an 85mm f/1.4 lens to control depth of field so I could throw everything but the leaf out of focus.
It rained pretty much all morning, and at times the rain got rather heavy. I looked out the back and saw water running off the oak tree and thought there might be a possible picture in it.
For this picture, I cropped the original, adjusted exposure and black levels, added contrast, sharpened it and added a vignette. Those are pretty much standard adjustments I make for any image. This fairly accurately represents the scene. Water can be seen dripping from the limb.
I took that image and converted it to black and white. This helped remove distracting areas of color, but almost seemed too sterile.
I went back to the original image and started by removing color saturation. That helped remove distracting areas of color. To give it a little more interest, I added a very light sepia tone to it.
Tamron lenses sponsored a photography contest for “Countryside” images. I entered two of my photographs. All together, they received close to 14,000 entries. There are two components to the judging. Anyone can go to the contest entires and vote for the one they like best. Then, professional judges will evaluate the images and the final winners will be chosen. The public voting period has ended, and I was notified that this images was in the top 50 vote getters.
As they say on TV, But, Wait. There’s more. This image was in the top 10 vote getters.
A couple weeks ago, coming back from Galveston, I noticed the Goldenrods were out. I have never gotten any pictures of Goldenrods. So, I decided to take an afternoon and go back and get some. I stopped at several locations, and will share those pics in another post. But, as I was coming home, I passed by this abandoned farm. All of the pictures of similar places I have taken were taken in the winter, and the lack of trees with leaves enhances the starkness of the image. In this case, I decided, rather than coming back, that I would go ahead and take some pics.
In doing some of the processing of the image, I added a vignette. Then I wondered what it would look like with a negative vignette. I think it enhances the feeling of this image.
An add in local Galveston publications features a picture of Pier 21 at dusk. It struck me as an interesting picture, but an HDR treatment might add to its effect. Debbie and I went to a concert Saturday night, and after it was over, we went down to Pier 21 and tried to get some pictures. I ended up with two versions, and I can’t quite decide which one I like better.
The statue on the left adds a strong foreground element to the composition of this version, but, I wonder if it is not also a distraction compared to the second version.
Our second stop was Belize, and we took a tour to the Altun Ha Mayan ruins. It was unbelievably hot, and the “guide” (as typical) went on and on and on about trivial details. There were about 40 people in our tour and two other groups besides us. So, getting reasonable pictures without lots of people was a problem. However, by using photoshop, I was able to produce some pretty good images.
On the road, as we drove along the shore, I noticed there was an old boat leaning against a tree. So, I took a quick picture of it as we passed by. With the use of a variety of NIK effects, it turned out to be a pretty good image.
