Week 45: # 49 Portrait with f8, “Roman”

This is my grandnephew, Roman. It was more of a challenge than I realized. After converting the image to b/w, I thought it looked pretty good but, as I examined the image closer, I realized something was off. My eye kept going to the stones in the background because they were sharper than the subject. I sharpened the subject more but my eye still wandered. Finally, I selected the subject in Photoshop, inverted the selection and added a gausian blur at a radius of 5 pixels. Now the stones don’t stand out and the subject pops a bit more. I love the concentration on his face. What will be doing next?

 

 

Week 40: #9 Product, “Refresher Course”

The idea for this shot was to show how refreshing LaMarca Prosecco is on a hot day. Being able to see the condensation on the bottle was key to communicating the message. I processed the original image in the Adobe Raw editor then fiddled with the levels sliders in Photoshop until I got the look I wanted. It was pretty straight forward, really.

Week 24: #6 Forsaken: “Poor Basil”

Ignored for too long, this basil plant didn’t make it. I used a chair cushion for the background and a Snap Art filter to add texture. I also increased the yellow saturation and added a lighting effect to create the vignette.

Week 23: #34 Squares, “My World is Blue”

This plexiglass art piece was viewed at the Winter Park Art Festival. It reminds me of a satellite spinning the the vastness of space.

Week 22: #33 Water Drop: “Sitting Pretty”

What a fun little exercise this was! It was inspired by a photograph that I once saw in a hotel room. Here you see 3 drops of water on a leaf of Swiss Chard. I used an eye dropper to carefully place each drop of water on the fold of the leaf, then took about a dozen images with my iPhone 6s and a clip-on macro lens. Shot outside in daylight.

Week 21: #32 Wild Card: “Daydreamin’ Day”

The attraction here was the repetition of the salmon color that runs through the frame, even including the navigation marker in the distance. The pole in the foreground concerned me but it echos the other pole holding the sunshade and the pylons under the pier, as well as the light poles on the pier. Besides, taking it out wouldn’t make sense given the other one. Fuji X-E2s, f16, 1/125 s, iso 200.

 

Week 20, #51 Rule of Odds, “Hi Fellas”

 

These birds are so used to humans that they seemed not to notice me at all. Shot on the dock at the marina under the Ringling Bridge in Sarasota.

Week 19: #42 High/Low Key, “All I Need is This Chair”

My new best friend helping me get back into yoga after an injury.

Week 18: #19 Geometric Shapes, “Afternoon Delight”

At first, I noticed the triangles formed by the late afternoon sun shinning on the house. Looking closer, there are several others. Do you see them?

 

Week 17: #8 Wild Card, “Celebration”

This is my friend, Debra, in tree pose. For some reason, the trees on the golf course inspired several poses and I was lucky enough to convince some of my yoga friends to let me photograph them.  I think the cascading palm fronds provide a nice back drop for the pose. This is another application of the infrared filter, which renders the dark tones nice and dark and seems to illuminate the light ones.