Daily Image - Dec 2014 Archive

01 Dec 14. Listening to the radio as we always do at bedtime, well, all day long actually, I heard the DJ say Friday evening about a forecast snowfall of 3 inches overnight. I thought it was to be local but Jan said no, it was two counties away. Oh well, one can always hope. But one should also be careful of what it is they are hoping to receive, for the snowfall of 3 inches was indeed local, and it was a very heavy wet one that fell on top of three day of HEAVY rainfall that had the trees rather soaked with water already. The snowfall was accompanied by freezing temps (20s) which meant that the water on the trees froze, the wet snow piled upon the branches, and the trees came a tumbl'n down putting tens of thousands of customers out of power, including us. We do have a generator in our system fortunately that automatically kicks in within 10 seconds of losing power, so we were unaware of the overnight activities until we awoke Saturday morning to a loud sound outside (the generator) and some rather bright surroundings. It was simply beautiful, and you can just imagine my first impulse! This is one of the results of that first impulse and was taken from our read deck as the sun was making its presence known. Note by that comment that this was a rare snowstorm in that after the snow fell the clouds parted, instead of remaining for days on end, and the blue skies allowed for the sun to make for us a magical wonderland. This image is subtle, with the effect of the sunlight affecting the trees in the background with those in the foreground still not experiencing the sunlight. I played around with it to try and make the sunlight more significant, but in the end I couldn't much improve on perfection and left it alone except for a little cropping of some open sky at the very top. Nikon D300s, 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/320 sec @ f / 6.3.

02 Dec 14. Today we return to the Tumwater Canyon image I shard last week for three days. This time it is another B&W approach, but of the basest kind being nothing more than a color image that has been desaturated. This is the quickest and easiest way to make a B&W image from a color image in that all that is necessary is to slide the saturation slider all the way to the left (assuming that the slider being employed has the desaturation value on the left). It isn't going to make for a very exciting image, but it will be a monochrome image in black and white. Put these two side by side and compare them. By the time we are done with this exercise I'm betting this will be at the bottom of your ranking. I have left the image as I shot it, but you could crop off about 20% of the right hand side of this shot to make a better photo. If you elect to do so remember to do the same cropping for each of them so that you are comparing the same photo in each instance. I'll provide 3 more in the next 3 weeks to give you a set of 5 to compare. Then you can do some playing over the Christmas break. As before, Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 320; 1/500 sec @ f / 8.

03 Dec 14. With the snowfall generally complete, Maggie and I took a stroll down memory lane to see if we might find a memory or two presenting itself for our commemoration. Just as we began our trek down the main road (main to us anyway) one of the neighbors drove by, stopped, and we had a nice chat interrupted on occasion by my snapping a photo. The wind was kicking up and the snow was falling down from the tree limbs creating a mini storm. At times the road was totally invisible but I failed to capture any of those shots due to the conversation creating a sufficient delay in getting the camera ready. I enjoyed the conversation, but would have preferred the shots, as one could occur anytime but the other was a rarity around here. This is one of the better snowfall shots, and if you look carefully, you'll recognize that what you might at first have thought was noise is falling snow. The dark trees left center and the darker green vertical trees in the center best display the tiny snowflakes. Normally you would be able to see past the end of the road and beyond, but with the falling snow you are not seeing much beyond 500 feet. Hopefully there will be another chance before Spring. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/1000 sec @ f /10.

04 Dec 14. For today's Theatrical Thursday image I'm using a shot of a bird feeder that sits on our back deck and received its fair share of snow last Saturday. I took it into the new plug-in I mentioned a few weeks back that has as some of its filters a few that closely resemble those available in Fractalius. This plug-in will likely be available in time for Christmas stocking stuffing; I'll let you know the day it is announced. Working on a copy of the original image, I made a selection of the plastic windows that were allowing sunlight to penetrate, and made them brighter. Then I cropped some off both the top and the bottom of the image, and then ran it through the filter. Finally I painted out with black a fair amount of material that I felt was distracting. What I was looking to accomplish was an image that, in a distant manner, resembled the foxfire glow that you get from certain species of fungi. It would more appropriately be green for a foxfire look alike, but I stayed with the blue as I felt it better represented the snow. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/400 sec @ f / 9.

05 Dec 14. Going a bit overboard for today's close-up. If you've ever lived in an area with lots of rain that was then followed by freezing temps, you will be no stranger to lots of miniature ice packs that have a habit of breaking up when something of greater mass moves over them. That is exactly what is occurring around here as I write. And I'll venture that most of us don't ever get down low and take a close look at all that ice around us let alone take a photo of it. IF you happen to look at it closely, you might be surprised at what you see. Of course, if you are not privileged with this kind of weather you could always turn to your powered icebox. This shot was taken a couple days ago near a local post office where there were several good sized fields of ice available. I like to shoot this kind of stuff up close not only for its structure, but also for the designs you see on top of the frozen puddles before they are broken up. This selection of ice had some very nice texture, but I thought I'd enhance it just a bit to make for an even more interesting image. The application of the filter was done to make the point that the ice is not totally clear, by simply making it more prominent. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/320 sec @ f /18.

08 Dec 14. A couple days post snowfall I headed out to a good friend's home which has a nice view of the Olympic Mountains looking west across Hood Canal. The weather was just a bit hazy but nothing that couldn't be corrected in software. I took several shots with the idea of creating a panorama taking in the entire range. This is what we have for today, a composite of 5 images with a little cropping for aesthetics. I've added in a small amount of grain to give the water and mountains a somewhat more realistic look, as neither of them are really smooth as they all too often appear in a two dimensional representation of a three dimensional object. The amount of grain you "see" will be dependent on your screen/graphics card combo. Aside from the cropping and grain, this is pretty much what the camera captured. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/500 sec @ f /11.

09 Dec 14. This is the fourth in the series of 5 versions of the Tumwater Canyon image. Next week will be the last of this series. If you aren't interested in the different approaches of creating B&W images, you can just delete this one and the one for next Tuesday as well. So far we've looked at a simple color de-saturation in RAW conversion software, a straight B&W conversion, and now a combination of a B&W gradient map coupled with a hue/saturation adjustment layer. This option allows you to actually adjust not only the saturation of a color, but to also change its hue. While this approach would render the underlying color image potentially unimaginably ugly, it can make for a beautiful B&W. The differences of these three approaches will be subtle in this particular image, but you will still be able to make out the differences if you set them up side by side. While there are still another couple approaches to creating a B&W image along these lines, we will forgo them and next week look at the image after being adjust using one of the many B&W plug-ins currently available. At that point you should really be able to see the difference. As before, Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 320; 1/500 sec @ f / 8.

10 Dec 14. The path that leads down to the trail circumnavigating the small group of lakes collectively called Chain Lakes, has at its midpoint a beautiful little stone bridge that gets you safely across the water so you can traverse the entire trail. However, were there no bridge at that location, you could easily wade across without getting much more than your mid calf wet with the most treacherous part being that you might slip on some algae and get the rest of you wet, but that's about all. The little stone bridge is rather photogenic, and I'll wager more than a few shots have been taken of it. The rock of which it is made is really quite beautiful in its own right, and depending on the light striking it you may or may not be able to take in its full beauty. The afternoon while we were there provided for some rather nice light, on and off, so I took several shots throughout my walk hoping to get it in its best presentation. I think this shot does a reasonably good job of portraying all the color present in the rocks, but it is entirely possible that there may be more. The early afternoon light also gave some nice color to the surrounding foliage, so overall the scene was nicely colored. All we were missing that day were a few trout. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/250 sec @ f / 6.3.

11 Dec 14. Today's Theatrical Thursday image is one that I've crafted, from the beginning, to only be creative employing the new Glow filter I mentioned yesterday. As such, it was just a tad bit more than a one button creation. About 20 miles outside of Spokane, WA, on the western side , there are a number of small lakes that are more or less picturesque, depending on the time of year you visit and the particular lighting during that visit. The last day of our fall Yellowstone trip we were passing through the area around 0900 and both the clouds and the lighting were rather nice, so I shot a few frames of one lake in particular. One of those shots was the basis for today's creation. To get from the original capture to what I'm sharing, I used the following steps. First I opened it in a RAW editor and corrected any lens distortion, then added a bit of clarity to bring out the clouds. Then I opened it in a graphic editor and ran the Glow plug-in. I opted to use the Lite - Brite preset, set its opacity to 32%, and used a hard light blending mode. That was it. The result is one I rather like although I wasn't able to get the exact results I wanted, the one small problem being that I couldn't completely get rid of the tiny halo at the horizon line of the hills with the sky. I'll have to play with it some more to figure out some way to prevent that from occurring, but even with it there it isn't terribly distracting. It is entirely possible you may not have even noticed it had I not brought it to your attention. while most folks will likely use these niche type filters for really creative stuff, I find that they can be employed to make some relatively nice images that are not way over the top, like some I've shared previously. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/400 sec @ f /10.

12 Dec 14. With heavy rains these past two days, and forecast 70 mph winds, the coastal storm is begin to hit where we reside, so this will be a short message in hopes that I can get it sent before we loose power. It has been flickering the last hour +, so it could go at any moment. And while we have a back up generator, I'd prefer to just use it for necessary things. This shot was taken in the garden section of our local hardware while the snow was still with us, and is more of a grab shot than anything else. I've cropped off a bit all around for composition and added a colored pencil adjustment to it using a plug-in. The adjustment has been reduced to 64% of full strength so that it doesn't over power the original image but instead gives it more of an illustration look as opposed to a simple photo. My hopes in doing the conversion was to give this two dimensional object a little bit of implied depth. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/1000 sec @ f /10.

15 Dec 14. Well, we made it about another hour after I sent the mailing Thursday evening before we lost power which stayed out until about 0600 on Friday morning. During our power outage we spent a goodly portion of the time listen to howling winds and things falling on the house. Fortunately it was nothing more than small branches, but as far as Maggie was concerned, her world was coming to an end. She was nothing but a quivering mass of protoplasm throughout the event. Had we not had continuous back up power from our generator, I can't imagine how she would have fared. When we got up on Friday morning the property looked more like we had been through a hurricane than just a wind storm that topped out somewhere around 60 mph. I spent a portion of both Friday and Saturday cleaning up the debris. By Sunday we had a clean path out of the property and on the way out to church was presented with some simply beautiful displays of God rays of which I took a few shots. This is my favorite of the group, although they were all very competitive. This is looking into a neighbor's driveway and taken from the road. I've cropped off a small portion on the right hand side for better composition and added my standard amount of micro contrast enhancement. But that's it. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/160 sec @ f / 5.6.

16 Dec 14. Today we look at the last of our B&W versions of the Tumwater Canyon image. This time I took the original image and converted it to a B&W base and then adjusted it with a series of 11 curves adjustment layers, with one layer for each of the 11 zones found the the Zone System. If this is something new to you, click here for a good overview. The individual adjustment of each layer was accomplished while looking at the image; it was all I did. Look closely at the ground cover in all the versions. Compare this result with the other three B&W versions as well as the two color if you like. Now make your choice as to what approach works best. Here is a link if you are interested in the software I employed to get today's version. IF you are a B&W kind of individual, you may find this piece of software a good investment; I have, and I use it frequently, but if you don't dabble in B&W you may well find little use for it. Same technical info as before, after all, it is the same image once again. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 320; 1/500 sec @ f / 8.

17 Dec 14. Today's submission was one that took two attempts at getting it right. The first time I tried replacing the bland sky and worked up a full set of variations before deciding it really didn't work - for a couple of reasons - so I just dumped them all and started all over. The second time I elected to use contrast enhancement to make the clouds stand out - they were basically just a whitish-gray background sans enhancement - and that worked O.K. The problem with the skyline is that the fog present in the scene was sufficiently washing out the tree tops and masking out the sky further diminished the tree tops to the point that parts of them were gone with the remaining branches floating in space. That doesn't look very realistic, so the challenge was working the tree tops in a manner that the problem wasn't there. The contrast enhancement did the trick. This was one of those shots where you literally had to be there at the moment, for the scene you see lasted for less than two minutes, and this shot was taken at the peak of the show. The general area was foggy with the sun punching through where it could; you can tell form the image that there wasn't a lot of opportunity. What was of interest to me in this setting was that the light was bouncing off the ground/barn in multiple directions, something I've never seen before. Look carefully and you will see what I mean. It was an amazing thing to observe, and by the time I took the last of just five shots and walked back to the SUV, less than 20 feet, the show was all over. We were very fortunate to have been driving along the road at just the right time. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/1600 sec @ f / 5.6 (to limit the depth of field).

18 Dec 14. Today's Theatrical Thursday submission was going to be primarily a fantasy type piece, but my major critic really didn't like it (I DID!) so I decided I'd go with something else. Same base image, but this time the creative part, which is definitely there, is very subtle; I'll let you decide what it is. This shot was taken beside the pad in front of our garage, and my intent in taking it was to capture the light shining down on just selected spots in the yard. At the moment of capture all that was lit was a narrow band running diagonally across a small section by the garage. As I was taking it the wind shifted blowing the accumulated snowfall off the limbs of one of the trees creating a mini snowfall right in front of me. What may look at first to be lots of noise in the image is actually falling snow. Although it was still snowing a tiny bit now and then the storm was basically spent by this time. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/100 sec @ f /10.

19 Dec 14. Returning from a visit at a friend's a couple days post snowfall, I noticed a small tree along side the road which was recovering from being substantially bent over from the weight of the snow on the branches and leaves. As it still had most of its leaves, it had collected a fair amount of snow, but with the combination of sunlight and a slight breeze it was shedding the white stuff as quickly as it could. It wasn't very impressive as I drove by it on my way to visit, but on the return leg the sun was now behind it illuminating the leaves and providing for some dramatic color. Of course, being a back lit subject, I couldn't resist and pulled over to capture it. As I was preparing the image to share today it dawned on me that this subject was a prime candidate for printing on canvas, and as I didn't have a canvas texture readily available (I have several but I didn't have them easily locatable), I elected to go with a filter that, while not exactly imitating canvas, could do an acceptable job. It was one of my creative types and it added a lot more than just texture. A lot of it I liked, but there was a fair portion that was competing with the subject, so I simply painted it out with black, directly on the image, making it a destructive edit. The bright white in the image is snow, so it should be that white. For those of you who like to examine these images, you will note that the white is not blown out but very close so it still has detail albeit somewhat manipulated by the filter. Taken on the first of December, it provides you some idea as to how late fall came this year. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/500 sec @ f / 7.1.

22 Dec 14. Back when we lived in MD we visited Brookside Gardens to take in their annual Festival of Lights. A bit pricy, but it included parking and access to their "coffee" shop which had live entertainment and warm beverages, a most welcome respite from the often very cold weather. And as they charged by the car, and not the occupants, a van full of folks made it VERY affordable. It remains one of the highlights, among many, of our stay in MD. Upon moving to Seattle we looked for something similar and found it, on a much lesser scale, at the Bellevue Botanical Gardens, their show being called Garden D'Lights. It was reasonably priced the first few years we went, but each year it increased in cost, but appears to have now returned to a reasonable price. They too have free parking, but nothing by comparison to the lights or entertainment of Brookside. But to be fair the MD show has been ongoing for a much longer time. Living on the other side of the Sound from the Bellevue show, we had been interested in something around here. Much to our delight, the Port of Kingston, the area around the Kingston ferry terminal, is decorated up in lights for over a month, has more than ample parking, free at night when the lights are on, and viewing at no charge. Plus the lights are on from dusk to dawn! Not a bad deal in my estimation. There are other locations nearby, but none as nice. We may just need to do some sleuthing to see what may be available in the greater Kitsap Peninsula; who knows, there may be some real treasures to be discovered. Today's shot was taken two days ago in between rain squalls at the port. Back in the heyday of film cameras, one of the favorite specialty filters was called a star filter. It was a piece if glass with, for lack of a better description, over lapping leaves of glass, much like a leaf shutter. It created streaks of light such that a point source of light would look like a star burst. You could get them with 3, 4, 5, 6, or more leaves to make stars with that many points. Today you can do that after the fact with software and that's what I did with the image I'm sharing. It should have been a quick and simple thing to do, but for some reason the plug-in didn't want to cooperate, so what should have taken maybe 3 minutes at most took almost 30. Some days the dragon wins. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/4 sec @ f / 5.6.

23 Dec 14. Today's submission is the exact same image I shared with you yesterday, except I've changed the blending mode from the default of "normal" to "difference". Blending modes determine how one layer reacts with the layer immediately below it. There are 27 of them and each affects the image differently. I understand what about half of them actually do, use only one in an image if I use them at all, and in total have played with less than ten of them. When used appropriately, they can have an amazing result. Today I used, for the first time, the blend mode of "difference." I have no idea how it works or what, exactly, it is doing, but in the case of the starry tree I shared yesterday, it has made a delightful transformation of it and I've elected to share. I thought it would be fun just to cycle through all of the blend modes with this image and was delighted with what this one did. A couple of the other 26 made some nice images also, but this is by far my favorite of the group. You might want to lighten it up a bit for a different look but I liked this dark version a lot, so that's what I'm sharing. Same info as yesterday, after all, it is the same image. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/4 sec @ f / 5.6.

Christmas Eve. Today’s bizarre image was made using the gradient tool with default colors of red and green. When the gradient tool is set to its default mode of “normal”, each application of the tool over writes the previous gradient allowing for only a single gradient . If however you set the mode to difference, you can apply as many levels of gradient you want. By so doing you can create some wonderful designs. Further, although the default is for a two color gradient, you can open the gradient editor and use as many colors as you want, your imagination being the limiting factor. See you all again on the 9th Day of Christmas when the Daily Image will return for its10th year.