30 Oct 12 . With rain forecast for most of Monday, it was our pleasure to see a beautiful sky with fantastic clouds as we crossed Puget Sound to spend the day in the dental office. Not exactly what I would describe as my preferred use of a beautiful day - should be reserved for a nasty day - but it certainly did get it off to a wonderful beginning after a very stormy night. The clouds were of three different types with the sun breaking through in places even though much of the sky was clear blue. An very interesting bit of atmospheric display. Today's submission is one shot of those clouds. It is not exactly what the camera recorded in that I have selectively lightened the water about 10%, added some color to the section of clouds that the sun had blown out, and tweaked the structure of the clouds to show more of their detail. Plus I've removed a portion of both the top and bottom which really didn't offer any additional information. All of this, save for the structure manipulation, would constitute nothing more than general darkroom technique in the days of yore. D300s; Aperture Priority; 18 - 200; ISO 200; 1/1000 sec @ f / 9.
31 Oct 12. Since my talk at the APAC Seminar was on how to improve any image with some creative editing, why not one for the group. Of course you've been seeing these "things" for several years now, but as they are what keep me having fun, let's do another. This began out as a straight picture of a hydrangea like flower to which I added a duplicate layer and then manipulated that layer to get a result that looked a bit like the petals had been electrified. I then blended that manipulated layer with the original normal layer by reducing the opacity of the manipulated layer to get the effect you see. Rather simple to do, but the hard part was deciding how much of the manipulation I want to affect the base image. In reality the manipulation took about 3 minutes, the decision for the final look was closer to half an hour. D300s; Aperture Priority; 18 - 200; ISO 400; 1/1000 sec @ f / 7.1.
