Pelicans

How high your awareness level is determines how much meaning you get from your world. Photography can teach you to improve your awareness level.
Ansel Adams

I believe photography has increased my awareness level tremendously. I’m constantly noticing details and light that I wouldn’t have just a few years ago. Now that I’m starting to paint on top of my photos, I’m noticing even more detail in colors.

While driving this dirt road, I saw a few pelicans out of the corner of my eye at Upper Klamath Lake. I hit the brakes hard and backed up until I had this view and shot straight from the car. I did shoot this guy with my D7000 at first with my zoom lens. Then I thought I’d get a shot with the iphone. I actually really like both pictures. You should click on the one above to see it larger.

I believe I shot this with camera+ and then edited with PhotoToaster.

Heres the Nikon shot.

One more of McWay Falls

I shot from a handful of different spots, but this is probably my favorite composition. I steadied my phone on top of my Nikon, which was on a tripod, so I have a similar pic I’ll probably share today or tomorrow. The detail in that one is awesome and its easily one of my favorite shots of all time. I had it up on my desktop almost all day yesterday, even when I wasn’t working on it.

We’ll consider this iPhone shot the low res preview. This is definitely a nice photo from the iPhone and it made the 24 hour feed on Tadaa for a while. Thats very hard to do because that place is usually reserved for those with 1000+ followers, not necessarily the best pics.

Shot with ProHDR and edited with Snapseed.

Yellows

There are things I like about this image and some things I don’t. Sometimes ProHDR doesn’t perfectly blend the 2 exposures if you don’t hold the camera steady enough. This made the trees and building look a little blurry and weird, but I really like the composition and the yellows in this image. When I walked through Lithia Park earlier in the day I noticed some plants were almost glowing. In the late afternoon I had to run to my car from the apartment, which is right across the street from the park, and I noticed the yellow trees seemed to be glowing again.

The one funny thing I can’t help but notice when I look at this is if you were to sit on the bench your back would be to the beautiful park and you’d be facing a restaurant. What a waste of a bench!

I took this with ProHDR, removed junk from the concrete with TouchRetouch, and used Snapseed to add drama. Using all of those apps, I was able to get pretty close to what I saw yesterday.