Thirty Days of Leaves 04 & 05

This was a new species of tree for me. They do not grow where I grew up or where I live now. The scarlet red color amazed me. 

Flowering Dogwood, Ohio

Canon ISO100, 135mm, f/6.7, 1/500sec

Preset by Kim Klassen, Autumnal 6 Drama

Canon ISO100, 135mm, f/6.7, 1/350sec

Preset by Kim Klassen, Autumn Copper with some extra adjustments.

Ranunculus

The garden is going crazy right now so it's hard to keep up with processing my photos. And if I get them done it might be awhile before I get around to posting them anywhere in cyberspace. (You can check Flickr for a few recents.) 

But I bought these luscious red ranunculus at the grocer last week and have tried to 'use' them up.  And I found this great window for $11. Some ideas I haven't gotten around to doing yet but I've had fun processing these. 

Some shot with my Canon and processed in Lightroom. I've used presets plus some tweaking.

Of course they were red but look so good desaturated. Some have even turned orange as they've aged.

Pretty Presets, Color Lux, Champagne

My own Preset, Crystal's Porch.

Pretty Presets, Clean and Creative Workflow

Pretty Presets, Color Lux, Honeydew

Pretty Presets, Clean and Creative Workflow

Kim Klassen, KK_Shadows

Preset 300v1 (I've had this for years, not sure where it's from.)

Oh, so hard to pick a favorite!

Kim Klassen Light & Airy Film Preset with some added light effects.

I've cleaned this one up and sent it to my iPad. I rarely edit my Canon photos there but love to do it once in awhile.

Monday I'll be posting some I did with the iPhone and edited for Mobile Art Monday. 

See you then and have a great weekend!

Mobile Art Monday No. 42

I had an editing frenzy yesterday while on the road heading home. The scenery was boring and I was tired of shooting from a moving vehicle. Besides, I had taken the mother-in-law for a drive around her town and a bit into the country so I had quite a stash to choose from.

I have a new Stackables formula for you today called Clouds. It's perfect for those cloudless skies. Click here to download the Cloud formula and save it to your Dropbox. 

Now on your device, open Dropbox and click the file. In the upper right corner, click the first box (with arrow pointing up) Use the 'Open in' option and choose Stackables. It will ask if you want to import the formula, tap 'Import'.

This was my (nearly) original after cropping and lightening shadows and such in Snapseed. I removed the power lines in Retouch. (Tip: remove part of them at a time, it turns out better.)

I then decided to see what Clarity in Camera+ would do. Then added two filters on top of that.

Since I was working on my phone I didn't have access to my hundreds of custom presets from my iPad. (I should remedy this and transfer a few favorites.) So I had a play with some of the featured artists formulas. (The center beaker with the star.) These were a couple of favorites.

Sands of Time

Crystalline 

This is another shot edited with the Clouds formula.

Sands of Time 

Another cool one from that group, Winter Sunset.

An abandoned house edited with Camera+ similar to the first one.

More featured artists' formulas. By Gone.

Jai Ho

I can hardly believe that someone lives there but they apparently think satellite is a necessity.

With all the flowers starting to bloom I may post more this week. That also means more work in the garden however, and soar muscles. I see a massage in my future.

Have a great Mobile Monday!

Spring - the Crocus Edition

I've been so lazy with my photography lately but I made myself do a couple things this week. 

First I ventured out to the Garden and Art Center because I knew the spring flowers should be blooming. (Although with our higher than normal temps, spring is 3 weeks early this year.)

Second, this morning I watch a video on how to use Topaz Texture Effects which I've owned since it came out and have never used it.

This is my first trial run. One thing fabulous about this software is that you can scroll over the textures and see what it will look like on your photo. You can also scroll over the blend modes for previews which makes it so much faster. (You can even access your own textures through it.) Tons of presets and oodles of tweaks to your hearts content.)

Products used, My Watercolor Brushes, Anna's Script Tease Nature, and my Sketchy Loops which will be in the store real soon.

I used Pretty Presets Lightroom Luminous on this shot. (Rose petals)

Another with that preset.

And another that I decide to mirror for my new header.

Dark and mysterious, edited with Kim Klassen's Chocolate.

All shots were taken with my Canon 100m Macro. I experimented with some focus stacking to see if I could get four flowers with four different focal lengths combined in one image to all be in focus.

Quite fun. Maybe not perfect, but it was a great exercise. 

If you want to try this out. Go shoot some images with focus variations. In Photoshop...

File> Scripts> Load Files Into Stacks

 Browse to find and select your files. Choose Open.

 Before selecting OK, check the box 'Attempt to Automatically Align Source Images'. It does a good job, but because of the blur from the macro lens I had to do a bit of my own adjusting. A tripod would  be advantage in most cases.

Now the masking begins on each layer. It's easiest to start at the bottom and work your way forward.

 Start with a black mask and 'paint in' the sharp areas. If you're not familiar with masking... ask Google.

Crop your image to clean up all the edges. Viola! Now if I want to I can load this back into Lightroom for further editing. I did do a touch of editing before I exported them to a folder on my desktop. (before the stacking)

I'm so glad spring is here. It's even raining a bit today. Ah... that fresh smell!

Celebrating Family

After moving 100 miles south of my family 30+ years ago... I don't get to see them very often. And sadly it takes me forever to get around to processing my photos from each trip. This year was a bust as far as my photography expectations where. The weather didn't co-operate, rainy cold, in fact it had been so rainy previously that some of the roads I wanted to explore were too muddy or rutted. So I didn't get to capture the barns and scenery I was hoping for.
The main reason for this trip however was to celebrate my dad and step-mom's 80th birthdays. (One in April and the other in October) It was good that most of the family able to come. Marilyn volunteered to do it in their garage and screened in porch so we came early to help with preparations. After everything was over and I was in bed it dawned on me that I didn't get one photo of them together that day. In fact I didn't even see the cake until someone brought me a piece. Where was my head? Helping dish up food I guess. I got some before pics which only I would treasure such as these too.

I stopped working long enough to play a couple games. (I actually beat him... and I know he didn't let me, he's far too competitive.)

 This gun was discussed for quite some time by the boys.

Two boys with their "pops".

She looks pretty darn good for nearly 80!

All previous photos were with the iPhone. The rest taken with my Canon 7D. All were processed with Nicole Young's presets at Craft and Vision, found here.

There were lots of great-grand kids around.

AJ and his siblings with fresh summer haircuts.

Rueben eats his first ice-cream bar.

My eldest brother and his first grandchild. (I have 3 more.) That's another thing that got by me. I should have had someone do a family photo of us siblings. It's been 5 years since the last. Good grief!

I did find lots of peonies blooming at the cemetery however.

It was hard to find any that weren't covered in bugs.

In spite of the pitfalls, the party was a great success and that day the weather was perfect. Hurray for family!

I'm linking up with Barb for Sunday Sundries.

Friday Finds -Bottles and Poppies

I've pretty much reached the end of my studio reorganization. At least I can work in it now and I still have a few empty shelves in the closet. Yes!

While going through everything' I found some old photos and memorabilia that brought back wonderful memories. I also found a small box of tiny bottles bought in a garage sale 2 summers ago. Best find ever! 

(iPhone, Snapseed, Stackables)

I set them up and waited for a morning I could pick some poppies and shoot away. I also found I was going to have to rearrange just a bit more so my body is not in the way of my morning light.

I was fretting early this spring that I might not have many poppies because the rabbits kept eating them. Unfortunately our little pellet gun is not sighted in correctly. We missed a whole lot more than we hit. But they survived in a few spots, one being next to the bird bath. I about died when I walked out a couple days ago and saw this.

(iPhone, Enlight app)

I tried to capture the same thing on the Canon but it's not quite the same.

More shots I found time to edit yesterday. I've made a preset that brings out the detail in the red and applied it to all of these. Then added another on top of some.

Added kk_serendipitous. (ISO 160 100mm f/5.6 1/180sec)

Added kk_serendipitous. (ISO 160 100mm f/5.6 1/180sec)

An old preset of Kim's called AutumnCopperII. (ISO 100 100mm f/4 1/250sec)

Added kk_lightandairyfilm. (ISO 100 100mm f/4.5 1/180sec)

Here's a before and after so you can see how the 'red' changes. Exactly one year ago I gave the details on my blog for these settings. Check out 'Shooting Red'.

Joining Kim for Friday Finds!