Sunday, February 28, 2010

Something Fun

Mirror effect...I haven't done this type of special effect in years...This is a kaleidoscope filter I downloaded from a website (sorry...can't remember which). The first time I used a kaleidoscope filter came from a CD in a photo magazine...I lost the CD from various moves and forgot about it...There will be a gallery entitled "Special Effects" on my website and my Flickr website within the next day or two...Stay tuned...

Monday, February 8, 2010

Magic Swirl

Late last year, a group of us from the Chester County Camera Club went to Longwood Gardens for a photo outing. While there Mary Brooks Brown showed me how to create a photograph using multiple exposures. I haven't done this before, not having read my entire manual, so I was eager to try it. As you can see, it is a really cool effect...This is a photograph using 10 exposures in one frame.

Change Is Good...Sometimes


I am always trying to view my photographs in many ways...whether it be lighting, textures, toning, or composition...to see if I can take the original and make it a bit better. Sometimes, I have to sacrifice the rest of the photograph in order to get what I want. This photo had many little petals from other flowers surrounding this one. I cropped the other flowers out and stuck with this one as the focal point. Instead of an 11x17 image, I ended up with a 12x12. I added a black border around it to give it a square look.

Friday, February 5, 2010

Holy Macro

About a week ago, I went out and purchased a Tamron 60mm f2 Macro lens and let me tell you that I am having fun with this lens. I have been photographing some students at my school for the yearbook, and the portraits I am getting are wonderful. I wanted to experiment the other night with still life photography, so I got the flowers my wife had in a vase and took a night lamp I had laying around, and set it up. I shot some of the flowers in B & W and some in Color. These flowers are yellow, but I used the Nik Color Efex Pro 3.0 Complete to convert it to black and white. Then I added the Sepia tone to the image by using the Sepia Action found in PhotoShop CS3. I love the way the light plays with the petals and how there's just the right amount of shadows weaving in and out and all around the flower. I took more photographs of the different flowers in the vase and will post them on my Facebook page and my Camera-i Photo Studio website within the next couple of days. Today, I bought my wife some sunflowers...can't wait to see what happens.