Moon through the maple tree

I took this photo in December. The moon was shining through the clouds behind the maple tree in our back garden.
The light on the trunk of the tree came from Christmas lights on the garden shed, it was just the right amount of ambiant light.

Daisies

Daisies are happy flowers.  While photographing them this afternoon they reminded me of the sun, radiating happiness from the centre out to the tips of the petals.

Tulips

Tulips are one of my favourite spring flowers. I love how the petals gracefully fold over each other creating a delicate cup.

Summer shoes

If I can't get outside to find interesting photo opportunities, I'll make my own inside. 

To set up this shot, I used four ceramic tiles set close together next to the sliding glass door for the natural light.  My props to set off the shoes is a linen scarf and my favourite flower, a tulip.

I used the lensbaby to create the soft dreamy image.

Now I'm dreaming of summer.

Cluxewe River Estuary, photographing shy swans

I had great expectations of getting out-of-doors this weekend to one of my favorite places, the Cluxewe River estuary. Unfortunately, today the wind has been gusting up to 60 kms, which does not make for a comfortable photographic expedition.

During the winter months, there seldom is another person on the beach or along the estuary. This is perfect when you are trying to capture a decent photograph of the trumpeter swans. They are very wary of any movement along the shore and will move to the other side of the estuary or float down river to the ocean if they perceive you as a threat to their safety.

These photographs were taken November 2008.

I'll try to get out next weekend for new images.

More about Layering Photographs...

I am a member of a small photography club in Port Hardy.  We get together every two weeks to share ideas and challenge each other and ourselves to improve our photography and digital editing skills.

Our last meeting was before Christmas and our homework was to create an image by merging or layering two or move photographs together.

My first attempt is the Budda photograph using Photoshop's Layers tool.... I think it turned out pretty good.

Over the last week I have been going through my photo files looking for images that I think will "merge" together to create dreamy looking images using another tool in Photoshop called HDR merge.

WOW! I love it!

I found and article in "Mastering Digital Photography: Image Control"  explaining how to create layered images.

Through trial and error I have created "Walking into the Sunset" by merging three images together.

 I saturated the colours in the forest.

This image was cropped to the same size as the forest, no other editing was done.

I lightened and saturated the colours for the sunset.

The end result is...

 

One thing I learned using this process, all the images must be created using the same camera and need to be cropped to the same size.  When I tried to merge photographs taken with my current camera a Nikon D80 and my old camera, a Nikon D70, an error image came up saying the images could not be merged because of this. I have not investigated if there is a way to over ride the error message or not.

All of the images used to create Walking into the Sunset were taken on a Nikon D70.

Learning about layers

With Ron's help, I have been learning how to layer photographs on top of each other using PhotoShop CS4. 

This is my first effort.  The Budda photo I took awhile ago.  The second layer is a Kleenx Box!

Tango

Tango is one of our two cats and generally speaking, doesn't seem to mind having his picture taken.

Ron gave me a new flash for Christmas and I have been experimenting with the different settings.

In the image below I had the white balance set to incandecent +3 instead of the flash setting.  Though it was an error, I like that Tango's eyes appear to be blue instead of yellow.

Lovin' the remote...

My Gramma loves mincemeat tarts. I promised her I would make some for her and bring them when Ron and I went to Nanaimo for New Years. 

I decided I should make some photographs of my efforts. It's amazing what I think of taking pictures of when I now have a blog to show them!

I put my camera on the tripod and set the shutter release to timer-remote. This gave me time to put the remote down and get my hands in the shot. 

They were very tasty little morsels!