Friday Finds, Daisy Bokeh

Good morning! It's Friday Finds over at Kim's blog and this week I found…

You can pick a daisy and stick it the dewy morning grass to capture some great bokeh! I believe I'll do this more often. All shots with my Canon 100mm.

Some presets used are Kim's.

f/4, 1/500, ISO 100

f/3.5, 1/350, ISO 100

f/4, 1/350, ISO 100

f/2.8, 1/1000, ISO 100

A matching bug!

f/8, 1/125, ISO 100

Don't you just love the randomness of daisies?

f/8, 1/125, ISO 100

More awesome light. The garden was just magical yesterday. I love the flares you get shooting into the light. I could tell I was getting a sun flare but didn't realize it was colored until I saw it on my computer!

f/8, 1/125, ISO 100

f/8, 1/125, ISO 100

Have a fabulous friday and check out what everyone else has found/discovered this week at Kim's.

Adventure with the Velvet 56

This week I found a fun lens in my friend's camera bag! It is the new Lensbaby Velvet 56. (I must admit I love the name.) She loaned it to me for a few days and here is what I found through this lens in my garden.

The only thing that is an issue with me is that this is a manual focus lens. It's very hard for me to see that detail and I tend to get eye strain in the process.

All these photos are unedited except on a few I did a little exposure boost (noted). Otherwise, no crop or anything because I wanted you to see what the lens actually did.

I love that dreamy look but this shot was one of my favorites.

There are 7 aperture settings from 1.6 to 16. The three apertures 1.6, 2 and 2.8 give you the ethereal dreamy look. The distance settings range from 5" to infinity.

Here are my daisies beginning with 1.6 aperture.

Another of my favorites!

(slight exposure boost)

(slight exposure boost)

This morning was so windy I did a little experiment inside. The aperture on this dried flower was set at 2.8 and I just adjusted the distance setting and moved a bit to get the different looks.

It was cool to play with but my pocket book has another lens on it's priority list. I did manage a few shots of my grand daughter, even though she doesn't stand still, that I'll post this weekend.

Happy Friday everyone!

Linking up with Kim for Friday Finds.

Mobile Art Monday No. 15

Because of fabulous moisture this winter and early spring rains, my iris are going crazy right now. It's been a sea of purples, from soft pinky purple to deep midnight purple, sprinkled with a few white daisies. Yesterday a few yellows and a rich brown have joined the chorus. By next week my favorite pinks will show their lovely faces. 

This week I've used Leonardo to layer up my creation.

My original….with a few tweaks in Snapseed and Retouch.

I was cleaning up my iPad icons and noticed quite a few apps that I couldn't remember what they were…. So I opened Shift, found a filter that looked good...

 and from that app opened it in Fragment.

I layered this over the top of the previous in Leonardo with the opacity reduced and blend mode set to screen.

Then I added a photo of a mixed media background I had painted for more background texture (gelli roll style).

I added a 'garden' sign from a previously edited photo and masked it.

I added one of my iris sketches and used 'parts' on four different layers.

Next… into Stackables where I cruised my saved formulas for a starting point. I found these two but decided I liked the grungy contrast of the one at the top.

Hoping this monday starts your week off with beauty.

Pristine, Not So White

I have one lovely white iris that grows at work. This one managed to escape the freeze.
Shot with Canon 100m Macro, edited in Lightroom.
This was not how I had thought my final edit would be. So I'll walk you through what I did.
This was my first attempt.

After a few 'normal' adjustments, I lowered the saturation to zero in the basic panel (except for the 2 on the left). Even though the flower was white, there was still color in the images. On those two images I used the adjustment brush to desaturate all but the area I wanted left yellow. I really liked the whiteness of it, that's why the title is Pristine.
The collage was then created in the Print Module of Lightroom and exported as a jpg instead of printing.
Now into Photoshop: I duplicated my layer. With the magic wand tool I selected the white background, held down the option/alt key and clicked on the Adjustment Mask icon in the layers panel. This automatically puts the mask on the opposite of the selection. (I could have just deleted it....)
In Photoshop I tweaked the levels a touch and masked the image in the upper left corner because it was already dark enough.
I still wasn't happy with the way my black and white images looked. Too gray for my taste. So I added my favorite way to 'tint' a photo in Photoshop. This is an excellent way to get a more cohesive look to a group of images or just tint black and white images.
Layer>New Fill Layer>Solid Color. Change the blend mode to soft light and click ok.

Pick a light shade of your choosing. You can alway lower the opacity of this layer. Mine is 35% At any time you can double click the color thumbnail to change or tweak the color. I decided to play around and add a second color to mine. Love the touch of warmth it added.

I wanted a subtle background pattern, I clicked on my background layer and added an overlay from the Allyse Overlays kit, #3 and lowered the opacity to 25%.
My tint layer is also coloring my background. If you don't want this, clip the tint layer to the photo layer below. In this case I would need to merge my levels layer down first. Choose the levels layer, right click and choose merge down.
To clip the tint layer to the photo layer, you have several choices.
1. Hover your mouse between the 2 layers with the option/alt key held down, when the 2-colored circle (or square in CS6) with a down-facing arrow shows up, click.
2. Select the top layer,  Go to Layer> Create Clipping Mask
3. Shift/Command/G or that would be Shift/Control/G on a PC.
Another option is to mask it like we did the background copy layer.
I added the 'Pristine' title using the font, Sweetly Broken (Dafont) a favorite.
By the way, what's blooming in your garden?
Have a super blessed weekend!