Fog?

So I was bored one day someplace and decided to take these two shots with my little camera. Do you think you can guess what I was doing and what kind of place at I was at? I bet you can't! XD

 In color.

Black and white (sure looks like fog, doesn't it?)

Hint: I took them from inside our vehicle.

Film

This is more of an introductory entry for the topic of Film rather than just one single one about film, I have more shots in film that need to be developed as I speak and I hope to have several more in the upcoming few weeks.
For these pictures here (and some I haven't finished with yet) I used a 200-speed roll of film (in my Minolta X-370 camera). For those unfamiliar with film, the number for the film-speed is equivelent to the ISO - or it's sensitivity to light.
Years back (or so they say) when film was the standard in photography, 200 and 400 speed film were the standard. 200 is less sensitive to light, and will often be darker if a longer exposure or adequate lighting is not used, 400 can take shots in the shade as well as capture some movement, and 800 (more rare 20 yrs ago) can do fast action and long zoom situations.

Anyway, here are all the non-portrait photos I took with this roll. I don't have permission from the model (my sister) to post the one's I did of her here yet.

Enjoy!

This one is a tad dark, but it is one of my favorites.  

Squirrel!

 An amazing shot, if I do say so myself. ;-D

Sort of a random shot, I guess....I call it "You Will Never be Forgotten".

High Key pink flowers! Perfect for this last holiday, yes?

Non-high key version.

Another shot of the blossoms. :-)

 Blue Jay! Well actually it's a "Shrub Jay" but it's a Jay and it's Blue, so yeah.

Another shot of a Jay (please click to view full size).

I hope you all liked them! I did pretty good with my first roll of film ever, don't you think?

Harps

Sorry I've been neglecting this blog, our video card went out on our desktop and I wasn't able to access my photos for awhile.
Anyway, here are some of my most recent shots, of a harp.

I was going for a controlled "studio lighting" style for this shot, where it looks like I used a light on the harp in a dark room (though in fact it was just a regular room with a chair in the background, and the lighting actually came from further to the right).

This unique angle was pretty awesome in my opinion, except for the part of the window down in the corner.

Did You Know? An actual harp lesson was going on while I took these photos. ;-D

 Same angle, edited in "duplex" coloring, whatever that is. I love the accents it gives to the mechanisms in the center left of the photo (when viewed full screen).

 Another duplex-colored photo, this time with the harp being played! This photo is actually my favorite I think, though the metal part of it looks much better if the photo is turned sideways:

So that it, and not the hand, is more of the main focal point. But that doesn't make much sense, now does it? Since harps aren't played sideways.

I hope you enjoyed these, and I would love your feedback! :-D

Oh, and make it quick...I've got more photos coming since I am behind. lol.

HDRs and a Tutorial

HDRs! For those new to the concept HDR means High Dynamic Range, which in my mind is a good definition as your main objective is to get a large range of exposures for a scene and put them together to get the best of each one.

This can be accomplished with only a few photos, and here's an example from my PSPX4 program:

Recently, I've been trying my hand at making these things, with a little success, but I know I can probably do better.

Here's my 2nd HDR of some clouds (my first stunk too bad, lol).

I rather like it, actually.

And now for my best one so far (at least in my DeviantART watcher's opinion, as I have more favorites on this thing than any of my other photos EVER).
The downsides are that the color is kind of unnatural, and it could have gone more sunset style than I did, but oh well.
Also, I kinda made this a tutorial, but as I'm no pro it's really just showing what I did. Please click it for Full View or view it on deviantart HERE.

After the processing I actually went and did more contrast and noise removal, as well as a few other minor things I don't remember. XD

I hope you like it!

P.S. These are all edits of the same image to resemble actual seperate exposures on only a slight scale. I haven't gotten the hang of actually taking a bunch of shots with a tripod. It would be too slow with my camera for a sunset.

The Many Edits of Watered Grass

Should have posted this waaay earlier, 'cause now I've forgotten how I did it. XD Oh well, I'll make a few notes on what I do recall.
The photos are of a small patch of wheat grass near us, and the edits I did aimed toward a darker "movie poster" style of feel, though I can't really place where I've seen a movie poster of this hue specifically...

 Minor edit of the original (contrast, color, clarity).

 Increased contrast and vividity (I also used a foliage vibrancy plug-in, which is why it's so green).

I took the foliage vibrancy back off and increased the colors for this one, probably stuck it through a filter for sunsets, too, then took some of that color and changed it with another plug-in (Or I just used the Sunshine plug-in to do both effects...).

This is even more contrasted and the color brightness and vividity toned down to make a nice shade of forest green.

Added even more contrast and played with another plug-in (Probably "Tonal Contrast").
Notice the shine on the nearest leaf, it doesn't look like a realistic reflection that much. I'll be changing that in the next pics.

This one is much darker and spooky-ish, lol. However, the reflection still isn't quite right.

This is my last edit (besides my Cold one) and the reflection is much better. The darker hue and toned down color makes good focusing for the water droplets. I lightened this one up a bit compared to the last one which was too dark.

I hope you guys liked some fo them! Which where your favorites? Some of the peope who've seen themalready liked the first vivid ones best.

Edit Me Challenge

Edit Me Challenge Week 1 (of 2012)!
The photo was tough, and I think I did a decent edit, but I missed it.......
I was going to submit on Saturday, but forgot. :-/

Anyway, here's the original and my edit:

I am not good at fixing lighting on my own photos, let alone this one. Look at that brightness! :o

This edit was the hardest I can recall ever doing. I tried SO hard to bring out the face, but failed (however, I see now that I did better than quite a few submissions, and the only one with a really good face uses CS5. Cheater! lol, jk). My methods here used contrasting, hue change, and a lot of small work you won't notice, hehe.

Main advantages of mine over the others? The sun spots!! I manually removed all of the main ones and de-colored the others, which makes it a very good edit in my opinion.
Main drawback? The face. I couldn't bring it out. the gal with Photoshop even made the eyes an awesome blue when you can't even tell in the original photo! :-P

Anyway, I hope to try again soon, and I would like any and all comments about this edit.

Colorful Flame

Have you ever looked at you stove burners in the dark and thought how cool they look? Well, obviously I did anyway, and here's the result, lol. The blue ones are the original color, and the green one is the best quality edit I did. I used PSP X4U's color changer to do the color edits, and the noise removal for sharpening and softening.

 Light Side
The blue really adds to the reflection down on the left corner!

 Dark Side

 Best quality. :-D I shoulda done it yellow so I could say 'neither light side nor dark side' lol. I increased the effect of the contrast with a plug-in. 

 These two are when it was on "low".

Up Next: A ton of edits to a picture of grass! XD

Photo Summary of my Week

I'll probably post some of the pictures from the photo shoots I did for this Photo Summary - but if you'd like to see them now please visit my Randomness Blog on like Monday next week or something to see the entry. :-D

I lead a pretty boring life, but this is my first time at this and I'd love some feedback.

Water Droplets

Some months ago my mom suggested I do some water droplets photos, so not long after that I found a plant at a friend's place and put water on it - then took pictures. I picked the plant because it was impervious to water, water just slid off of it, so it made pretty good droplets if you could get any water to stay on it.
I will have to have a go at this again sometime as I didn't get enough good shots, but here's what I do have, starting with the best, lol:

The best shot ^

This one was just so weird with how many different focal depths of droplets there were, it kinda hurts the eyes. This top one here is the higher-contrast and saturated one, that's cropped.

 And this one is closer to the original.

This picture turned out quite well in terms of the leaf and the colors, but the large droplet that I wanted in focus....was not. This above picture is using an "Earth Tone" filter.

And this shot was edited with a "Night Effect" filter. Which do you like best?

In other news, I'm over being sick, so I should be able to post more (I've got some more edits - of flowers - coming soon), and I changed this site's "Favicon" to the GT shown at right. ---->>

The favicon is what shows up at the top next to the URL and hotlinks to my page.

They're actually pretty fun to make, and I have a custom one for each of my blogs on blogspot here. If you guys would like one, just ask! :-D

Clouds

I decided to do multiple edits of some clouds (influence: Amy's edits). I don't like things as edited as she does, but I need to practice going-out-of-the-box with my edits....and it's really hard for me, lol. I'll see what I can do with some of the river pics I have.

Near-original (slight contrast and noise removal)

Temperature drop (not far. With noise-removal)

High-contrast (with noise-removal)

Temperature raised to the high mid-range (also used noise-removal)

SUPER contrast with earth tone filter and a tiny amount of noise removal

Overall scene (contrast, saturation, noise removal)

You can tell I like noise removal, though sometimes it doesn't do much.

Flower Bush

We have a bush of these flowers nearby our house, and I'm not sure why I didn't take pictures of it before. They are amazingly hard to get complete focus on, so that is the main problem with the shots I have so far: Bad focus.
I hope you like them anyway though, I shall be taking more shots trying to get some better focus. :-)

This one is my favorite from this shooting. The focus is better and the flower looks so soft!

I like this angle, but yeah, the focus is kinda off.

Here you see one's before they are blooming.

This is from my second time trying. The flower doesn't look bad, but it's a little small an doesn't appear to be the main focus. I love the leaves in the bottom left corner though! They make an awesome border.

Things learned: The middle of the day is not the best time of day for taking shots of these flowers.