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.
I have been attending meetings in Marksville, LA for the past few days. Before going, I looked at a map and found there are two wildlife refuges on either side of Marksville. Yesterday, I took some time to visit Gand Cote NWR. It didn’t have a great deal to offer, but I think it is rather early for migratory waterfowl. Anyway, I got a couple of good landscapes.
There was a rather substantial wetlands area. The nature trail led up to it, and then a bridge led to an observation platform over the water. These are two images taken from the bridge.
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.
My Thursday afternoon schedule is rather flexible, and the last couple weeks, I have taken Thursday afternoons to take pictures around town. Yesterday, I concentrated on the Southeast are of downtown and then went to the courthouse.
Pink is normally an inviting color. To have a wall and a door painted pink and then putting a big Keep Out sign on it seemed to me to be a contradiction. This was a vacant building on the corner of Eighth and Jackson.
When is the last time you saw a building with a cistern for collecting rain on the roof? This is the Texas Fireproof Storage building on Eleventh and Mary.
I mentioned in a previous post that on the way home from Galveston, I noticed that the goldenrods were blooming, and, since I have never gotten any pictures of them, I decided to run down highway 6 and get some pictures.
Of course, there were a variety of insects associated with the blossoms, like bees.
and a Beetle.
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.
I want to write a longer post about what I went through to produce a specific image. When I was coming back to the car after I took the pictures of the “Wacotown” sign on the building at fourth and Franklin, I looked and saw the combination of the clock on the WISD’s Mae Jackson Building and the ALICO Building.
I used the exposure brackets in the camera to take three pictures – one correctly exposed, one under exposed and one over exposed, and used the HDR software to produce an HDR version of it.
I liked that, but, somehow the clock was giving me an art deco vibe, and that made me wonder how this would look as a black and white image. So, I took the HDR image and removed the color in Aperture.
That had a rather dark and brooding nature as a result of the HDR treatment. I decided to try something else, and used NIK effects Color Effects Pro on the HDR image to make a Black and White version.
That made it a little darker and even more broody. I tried Using NIK’s Silver Effects Pro on the HDR image and got this.
That was really dark and broody. It had almost an old horror movie feel to it, and it looked really grainy like it was shot on tri-X film and pushed. So, I wondered what it would look like with less treatment. I went back to the original, single image that was correctly exposed and used Silver Effects on it to get this.
This is much “cleaner.” I think I am going to make an 8×10 print of it, and put it in an 11×14 mat in a simple black frame.
Another Waco landmark is the Dr. Pepper museum.
While photographing the museum, I noticed about a block away, across the street from First Baptist Church were these two structures. I believe they are grain silos, but I am not sure. They appear to be long-ago abandoned, But, they are still interesting.
On Friday, I took these shots on the corner of Fourth and Franklin.
I found this second image interesting, and worked up some variations on it that I will bring back in another post.