Red LadyBird, Grey Background

Final post for the week. I saw a fly sitting on a leaf and thought… quick, macro photo time. Sit down, this may shock a few people but…

I didn’t have my macro lens attached at that moment.

Yes, that’s not like me… so, I quickly changed lenses, and the fly waited, and waited and then flew off (laughing no doubt). Elliot then spotted a great ladybird walking about on a conker shell. He took some photos, then I tried with the macro lens. Without a tripod, it just didn’t work at all, too much wind, hands too shaky. Luckily, I still had my pocket camera, and that did a much better macro job than my fancy lens. Simple can be much better!

So, I cropped the photo and made the background monochrome. It’s the first time I’ve tried this technique, I basically selected the ladybird with the magic wand in photoshop, inverted it and then desaturated the background. It works, but, the ladybird looks like I cut it out from another picture and stuck it on. Any tips on how I could have done this better? Thanks in advance, and…

Have a great weekend!

Leaf – Close Up

Here’s a piece of a beautifully coloured autumnal leaf that we picked up during the forest walk, macro, as you can tell. To me, it has this strange snake skin type look.

The Curve

When I go to Legoland, I never take my SLR. When I’m there, my reason for being there is purely and simply to have fun with the kids, so, I don’t want the distraction of the SLR. Generally I don’t have a camera but, I knew I needed to get photos for this week’s blogs so I took my pocket sized Canon IXUS 120. Whilst waiting for Elliot and Joshua to come past on the Duplo train, I thought this photo of the train tracks might make an interesting picture.

Sharp

During our forest walk, Elliot and I went looking for conkers so that I could reshoot my sharp and smooth photo. The conkers aren’t quite ready yet though but the shells are fine for clicking.

The Leaf

Another crazy week at work has now finished. Too many hours leaving me with not much time for anything else. I can’t see it getting better anytime soon. This weekend though has been great. Took the kids to Legoland on Saturday, then went for a walk in the forest with Elliot in the afternoon and got some nice photos. (He has his own little red Fuji camera which he loves). Sunday was good, tried a new technique and the results came out well. Got some work to do to clean up the photos but, I was pleased with the results. Look forward to posting them soon.

Here’s a photo from our forest walk, The  Leaf.  Truth is, I took a very boring photo in the hope that I could manipulate it in photoshop to be more interesting. Played with the curves, selectively manipulated the green to bring it out more, and then played with the levels a bit. Honestly, I need to read up to understand what I did but, I like it and that’s all that matter

Falls

This shot, is the obligatory waterfall shot that all photographers must capture during the early stages of their photography life. Lovene (who some of you know, who doesn’t have a blog) took a great shot which I wanted to try to recreate. We all see the waterfall shot and wonder, how can I capture such smooth water, and then we eventually get it, store it, never bother to take that shot again and tick it of our list of ‘shots everyone must take.’ Christos came with me to Virigina Waters. A well named place as it was the first time that I used my tripod in public. It wasn’t too bad as Christos was geekier than me thanks to his bird watching special camera jacket. He taught me all about the correct aperture requirements to get the smooth waters. Then we walked around the park and cursed when we were half way around and realised that it was going to take another 90 min to get back out of the now pretty dark park.

Have a great weekend…

Smooth and Sharp

Here’s one I made earlier. I took this last year with my Sony Cybershot and it did quite well in the monthly competition. I love it because it came out exactly how I pictured it and because the kids helped me find the bits and pieces that I needed to make it, whilst we took one of our Autumnal forest walks. I’m looking forward to recreating this shot this year with an SLR. Not long until the conkers fall from the trees.

DS321 – Complimentary Colours

What works better that red and green (okay, maybe black and white).. and, what says red and green more than Christmas tinsel (although these are actually pipe cleaners) (okay, 3D glasses do).  Picky, picky…

DS317 – Plug

This is strange one. I looked at last week’s daily shoot themes and picked out a few. Strangely, on Friday, a guy at work discovered my friend’s iPhone plug and was amazed by it. I figured, that fits well for this theme and tried to get it. I’m a firm believer that mundane objects can be made to look beautiful, although, to be fair, the iPhone plug strangely does that job very well on its own. I really like this photo, I think it turned out well, although, if I’d cleaned the plug first, I think it would have turned out better. Oh well..

Go into the Light

I’m totally whacked this week, work has been not stop for 4 weeks and my brain is fried. I tried to get some new photos but, it wasn’t working for me. I did get a couple of new photos but it looks like Thursday and Friday will see me dipping into my buffer pile. Hopefully next week I’ll be full of ideas!

So, you’re looking at the photo below and thinking, ‘he just reposted what he had last week’. Not true, but, pretty close. This is ‘that’ staircase from below. Right at the bottom of the stair case is a locked wine cellar and not much else. It’s also a little spooky down there.

Forgot to add the photo! Big thanks to herby for the comment!