27 Jun 13. Sitting on our rear deck amid dozens of other plants that either don't fit into or belong in Jan's plant room (sun porch) is a lovely primrose but of a variety many of you likely have not seen before. The plant produces a tall spire, or set of spires, three on this particular individual, that are surrounded by a myriad of tiny red buds that turn to purple when they open. The plant "blooms" from the base up to the tip of the spire, resulting in a red tipped purple spire. It is quite impressive in my mind and we bought one from Valley Nursery last year. It was a bit on the smallish side when we purchased it, but this year the spires are somewhere around 18 inches in height. It being Theatrical Thursday, I decided to share a fairly creative version of the photo I took of the plant in bloom, and even though I've really manipulated it, it does a rather good job of representing the complexity of the blooms on the spire. This was a very easy image to create: background layer (original photo); dupe of background to get the crop I wanted; a dupe of that layer to perform some cloning and removal of unwanted foliage; and finally a dupe of that layer on which I ran the filter to create the effect. Everything flattened and saved as a sRGB (for web viewing) jpeg image. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/400 sec @ f / 7.1
28 Jun 13 . As a youth I can remember hearing the phrase "in a storm any port will do" applied to many different things, but all relating to finding something necessary in a time of need. Sometimes the application of the phrase was meant to be funny, other times not so. But it generally got the idea conveyed that the speaker wanted. While we were walking on Scenic Beach a few weeks back during one of the low tides, I couldn't help but be reminded of that phrase when we came upon a couple of sea stars that were doing their very best to stay out of the elements, in this case a beach minus the water. Most of their compatriots were making the best they could with an occasional rock or patch of seaweed, but these guys had found an old container coming to their rescue. I've enhanced the texture of the container a fair amount to make up for what is being lost to decomposition, and also added some, to a much lessor degree, to the sea stars to show off the beautiful designs on the animals. The rest of the scene is basically what the camera captured. Background layer was duped for the texture application of the container, then duped again for the animals. Both layers were masked to limit the application to just the objects desired. All 3 layers were flattened to make the final image. The background (beach) softness at f/9 may seem odd, but this was a very close shot resulting in what you would generally associate with 4.0 in a normal scenic. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/125 sec @ f/ 9.
