Thirty Days of Leaves 03

And one more Honey Locust from Nashville at the Courthouse.

I had decided to put my long lens on that day and was glad I did. 70-300.

30 Days of Leaves 02

Honey Locust

Taken in Nashville Tennessee.

Playing in the Light

This week I had a few free hours at work for 'cleaning' up my Lightroom catalog. I had to go back to March and start culling. Of course I got side tracked and started editing some because I'd done very little of that too. I was captivated once again at how my neighbor's lilacs danced in the light that day.

I wouldn't have thought they would look so stunning in black and white, but who knew?

Their buds look like little alien mouths.

Such delicacy.

 Such beauty.

Have a beautiful weekend and a great Mother's Day!

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!

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!

Summer at the Garden and Art Center No. 2

The Cosmos has become one of my all time favorite flowers. It may have replaced the sunflower as number one on my list. 

It's petals have such defined crisp lines. 

It can be quite stately if you catch it by itself.

And quite dramatic.

It will dress in orange if invited to a party.

I love it's messy chaos which represents freedom and grace to me.

I think the main reason I love these flowers so much is that I can identify with them. From the feelings of messy chaos to the stately elegance. Sounds like a perfect package.

In love with Flowers

I'm in love with flowers. There, I said it. I'm also in love with the deaminess I can get in Lightroom. I used Pretty Presets in these edits. A mixture of several. Their Clean and Creative Workflow is my favorite.

I believe cosmos are the most photogenic of all flowers.

I love the slightly desaturated version of this one.

And the warmth of these as they turn toward the sun.

Pretty Preset also has some great bokeh effects with their Luminous Set. I think I added 2 or 3 to this one.

All shots made using my 100 Macro lens with my Canon. My aperture setting were 4.5 and 5.6 on these shots. 

I've had more fun shooting my flowers this year with this lens.

Portraits with the Velvet 56

My shots of my grand daughter using the Lensbaby Velvet 56…

I honestly don't remember the aperture setting, but I'm guessing it may have been 4 judging how hard a time I had getting both eyes in focus.

Other that a little exposure boost of .75 and a little eye brightening, the only thing I did to this one is remove nose boogies. AND I did change the camera calibration to camera portrait (in Lightroom). I just heard that tip this weekend and what a difference!

Being a photographer you'd think the first thing I'd do when I got her home from daycare would be to clean her face!

I used to loath using the clone/heal brush in Lightroom but with some practice you can make it work on the worst of the worst. 

Here is a close up of the before and after with all the adjustments dots I used.
(For all the other shots I used Photoshop healing brush and clone stamp tools.)

A few tweaks with Pretty Presets Clean and Creative Advanced Workflow.

Then my own adjustments to create the monochrome below.

Pretty Pastels Raw LR4: Alabaster 

Original slightly tweaked and cleaned up.

Pretty Pastels Raw LR4: Pink Skies

Pretty Pastels Raw LR4: Matt B&W

I decided to try a couple of Kim Klassen's presets on these.

KK_onair

KK_gentle

And one more…

I really was surprised I got as many as I did having to manually focus with this lens.

'They' say if it doesn't add to the photo, crop it out. Maybe that would be the case here. I thought the hair on the right was a bit distracting so I really do like this square crop.

I just love this sweet girl!

You can see my floral edit using this lens here.

It's Texture Tuesday at Kim's where there's a lot of editing with Lightroom presets. Go check out the loveliness there.

I'm also joining Lisa at Life Thru the Lens.