Hello Again!

Hello! Decided to come back to this blog. I've been meaning to do so for a long time, but haven't been taking the quality of photos I wanted to be taking with my new Nikon D5100. So bear with me til I get used to the camera!
Here are three edits of a sunset I wanted to play with using an HDR editor. Since I used some local toning in the processing of the source photos, I'm sure that's why the end result wasn't quite what it should be.
Either way, what do you think?

~Knight

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.

Cats Galore

I hadn't realized I had taken so many pictures of the same cat! Below I have some of my best ones, but for all of them, please go here: http://oneofakindknight.deviantart.com/gallery/

Hope you enjoy! They look even better full-size! (click to go full-size)

 I LOVE the pose on this one!

 I'm soo sleepy

 

 Contemplation...

 Look into my eyes....

 

The Black and white looks really nice on this shot I titled "Devious Kitteh".

I love the quality on these shots too. They came out better than I expected with my compact (12MP setting woohoo!).

Mini Flowers and an Edit

Anyone remember the small orange flowers I posted last month? (Rivers and Flowers and Faces, oh my!) Well, something you may not know is that those flowers (and the ones from this post) are all smaller than a fingernail! Yeah,  hadn't thought to say that before, but my siblings didn't even know what size they were till I showed them in person and they were quite surprised by that fact, so I decided to say it in a post. ;-D
Another thing I'm up to is something I learned from Dakota's Nature Photos, which is to post less pictures per entry and post an entry more often. XD So no more many-picture posts with random subjects that make complex titles and hopefully posts more often! How's that sound?

Anyway, now for the flowers. They aren't the best focus (not sure why), but I decided to post them for the better qualities they have.
The 2nd and 3rd shots are exactly the same except I edited them differently and would like to know which of the two you like better! The rest are ones I had wished were better....with the first probably being the best.

I was actually doubting I'd get a decent shot of these purple flowers, but I did.

Shot Edit One

Edit Two. Which do you like better?

I like the focus on the flower for this one.

 I like the rocky background quite a lot. :-)

 The purple on this on was pretty cool. Click on it for full view!

 These were okay, but the focus wasn't working out on the center of the flower.

I hope you enjoyed these some. :-)

Also, THANK YOU ALL FOR THE 2200 PAGE-VIEWS! :-D
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