Garage in Blue
This shot was taken as part of my experiments with an Olympus Pen half-frame camera. This was the digital control shot. When I was processing it I came across this treatment in Topaz B&W Effects which I kind of liked and which ended up used some of my subsequent treatments. The original shot, and the film version can be seen here.
Solstice Lotus
It’s the winter solstice, here in the northern hemisphere, and our days will now start getting longer, which matters a lot in the north. This ceramic candle holder, made by Cathi Jefferson and decorated as a lotus blossom, was sitting on our stove top last night in anticipation of the solstice.
This is not as dramatic a shot as last year’s Gonzales beach solstice photos which are among my all time favourite photographs but I find it calming and a nice way to mark the day. If the weather and timing is cooperative, I might be out again tonight trying for some more photos like I took last year.
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Clover Point
I like this view of Clover Point as the lines lead nicely to the bright ribbon of sky over by the Olympic Mountains. It was that part of the sky which was really the subject of many of my shots, some of which have been see here in the past few days. Being out with just a 50mm lens, it was not the best subject for the equipment at hand.
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A Pair of Bins
This picture should be subtitled “or a difficult crop”. Crop is not exactly the first thing that springs to mind however. This part of Beacon Hill Park is a popular dog walking area and in Victoria it is required that dog owners pick up after their dogs. The box on the pole has plastic bags for that purpose while the sign instructs. That there is a need for two bins says too much about the volume of picking up. I stood waiting to take this picture for about 10 minutes – there were too many dogs, and their stooping owners, for the simple shot I was wanting.
When I was loading the un-cropped version of this picture (first image in the gallery below) the WordPress display showed it square without the bench. The composition seemed better in the thumbnail, so tried some cropping. And I ran into a mountain of indecision. In the end, I liked the version above which is in the original sensor ratio but without the bench and showing lots of the junction between two paths on the left. I kind of miss the bench though.
If I only had one of these images to display, I would not hesitate (too long) about posting it, so it seems a versatile scene.
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STOP School
Break time for the school bus driver on Dallas Road near Clover Point. I expect that school bus drivers are in desperate need of such breaks, at least on the bad days.
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Rose’s Star Effects
A post in November included the application of Topaz Star Effects to a sunset. Some of the response to that post caused me to revisit the software using a Christmas scene where tacky kitsch is more permissible. I know, it’s a bit early, but Christmas is not really the point of this post. The photo above has “natural” star effects – that is they are produced by the lens and in-camera. All the others are added afterwards, including the animated gif which you won’t be able to see unless you open this post all the way (a remark added for my WP readers that view posts only the WP Reader or its stripped down preview, neither of which is going to show much of this post).
The doll used in these tests is named Hitty Rose, she lives around my house and her Human blogs about the adventures of Rose and her sisters elsewhere. Indeed, the test photo used below was made for that blog as an introductory photo when Rose moved in one Christmas a few years ago.
I chose the photo for the test because it had points of light without star effects, and had a companion photo (above) with lens produced effects for comparison. Both are jpegs shot at high-resolution. The test photo is cropped. The first image below is the base image used before adding any star effects.
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