First Tulip

I finally dragged myself out of bed and decided to put some eye candy up. Better late than never. I swore I was going to take today off since I was forced to work yesterday when my mom made me do portraits of 3 babies and a family….all for free .

Here’s my little PSA: If you know a professional photographer, don’t ask them to shoot stuff for free, especially when they’re family and supposed to be relaxing. Also, if they’re nice enough to post the images on fb and tag you, don’t download the image, crop it, and upload it on your page with much lower image quality and a ruined composition haha.

Anyways, please enjoy this tulip. It was the first one to open up last week.

Shot with the default camera app. Edited with SimplyHDR.

Double Daffodil

I got a little creative with this one. I shot with mirrorgram and liked the image, but it was a little out of focus. I didn’t want to scrap it, so I used shockmypic for the painterly look. Finally, I used snapseed to add some contrast and darken the image slightly. The result is much better than a blurry photo, in my opinion.

Busy Bees

These 2 bees must have spent at least 15 minutes on this one flower. That gave me plenty of time to try and get a good pic with my iPhone. Luckily, my brother’s cat didn’t see them. I brought him outside with me to get some fresh air. Attacking bees is his favorite thing in the world, but he was busy doing other cat activities.

 

I’m 30?

It’s my 30th birthday today. That sounds weird to me. I never thought I’d live this long haha.

One Flower

Last year I took on the challenge of taking 500 photos of one subject with my old Nikon D60. This is the orange flower I chose out in the garden. It looked interesting and I thought it would be pretty easy to take a lot of pictures of it. It didn’t take too long before I was out of my comfort zone of taking my usual pictures. This is what a challenge is for, pushing you beyond your comfort zone and forcing you to try new things.

I shot from my normal distance and I also shot from as close as my lenses would allow.

I used the two lenses I had at the time, my 18-55 and 55-200. This one below was with the 55-200, shot through a chain link fence. This is probably my favorite shot from the whole shoot. Normally when I’m shooting a flower, I don’t think about moving away from it and shooting through something, but look at those results!

Heres a similar angle with a much different edit.

I also tried a kinetic shot. I had recently heard about kinetic photography and was experimenting with that technique. For this one in particular, I believe I was zooming in while pressing the shutter. It certainly adds some interesting motion to the image.

I felt like I was running out of ideas towards the end, so I switched to manual focus, just to try something different. At one point when I was adjusting, I went almost completely out of focus and saw something interesting happen. The photo turned into a painting.

Since I’d done a whole lot of shooting with the flower open, I wanted to call it a day and come back in the morning when the flower was wet and still not open.

Don’t be scared to try anything you can think of and don’t worry about how you look when you’re doing it. When I first got my Nikon a few years ago, I wasn’t comfortable being that guy that always had his camera around his neck. Eventually, we all have to get to a place where we’re ok with looking like a weirdo crawling on the ground with a camera.

More Fake Flowers

I saw this fake flower in the bathroom at a winery the other day. I liked the way it looked in front of this nice window, but the fakeness of the flower kinda ruins the shot for me.

I still haven’t found a winery I like out here. I was very spoiled on the central coast of CA with all of the amazing wineries they have. I swear the white wines at this place tasted like liquid soap was the secret ingredient.

On that note, I’m heading out to Jacksonville, the wine country here in southern Oregon to go check out some galleries and maybe taste a little bit. Have a good one
Shot with camera+ and edited with Snapseed.

Textified Flower

A while back I downloaded an app called Textify.it because it was offered for free at the time. It looked similar to another app that looked cool, WordFoto. WordFoto is actually the only app to deny me a promo code. I don’t know if its really their fault though. They claimed to be out of them at the time and I never heard anything back. Their loss is Textify.it’s gain.

The original photo was shot here at the desk I’m currently using. Felicia has a fake flower here that looked interesting enough to be the subject of a snapshot. The real reason I was interested was because of the lines the blinds were creating on the wall.

The edited photo above is ok, but nothing special. It needed something to make it stand out. I browsed my 60 or so photo apps and saw Textify.it. I figured I’d see what I can do with this app I’ve only used a couple of times before.

I adjusted the font size, the character quantity, and even tried using different characters. The first one below was composed of RED. The one below that was a bullet point *+# and an accidental L, but it worked.

If you’re interested in Textify.it, its 0.99 in the app store.

Central Coast Sunset

I walked up this big, rolling  hill to watch the sunset last night. Its the same location that my banner pic is shot from. The difference is this is an iphone version and that was from my old Nikon D60.

Shot with ProHDR, edited with Snapseed and FilterStorm.

Cosmo

Here is another pic I edited really quick with FilterMania 2.

Feeling Lucky

These clovers were growing all over the place at Limekiln State Park. They looked especially cool as a carpet underneath the redwoods. I don’t remember what I shot this with or what I used to edit. I’ve been doing too much editing to remember.

I got a nice email yesterday from the marketing manager at Nik Software, the people who make awesome plugins and Snapseed, thanking me for the support of their product and telling me I’ve done great with it. =)

Yesterday afternoon I posted a photo from Limekiln SP to my other blog, but it got a whopping 10 views. Go have a look because its a good photo from my Nikon and an example of long exposure which is the new collaborative effort Nick and Shannon are hosting. Be sure to folllow my other blog if you want to see more stunning shots from Big Sur in the near future.

Iris

We have a few opening up around the yard now.

I tried something different here by blending an NIR version with one I edited in Snapseed. I had like 7 different versions of this image, but this is my favorite.

Portrait of a Tulip

Be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence.
-Minor White

I tend to avoid taking pictures when the sun is high in the sky, but yesterday when I went out in the yard around 1, there was some good light hitting the tulips. I took quite a few pictures before I really became present and observed what was going on. The tulips were dancing in the breeze and basking in the warm sun. After I became aware of what was going on I changed my approach and got some amazing images with my Nikon (see one below.)

I was using camera+ and the white balance was totally thrown off on all but one image because of the intense color. I’m surprised by how much detail there is in this one. All I did was add a little ambiance, a tiny amount of drama, and a little structure in Snapseed.

Here is the winning shot of the day from my Nikon.

Symmetrical Flower

Yesterday I bought an app that was on sale and had a lot of good reviews called FX Photo Studio. After a few minutes exploring it, I felt like a sucker because its filled with 20MB of fluff. There are a lot of filters, but I found like 7 that I might actually use. There are hardly any adjustment sliders to edit your photos, so I wouldn’t call this an editor. I’m not impressed at all to be honest and I’d save your dollar if its still on sale for that price. If, however, you are a teenage girl, you might like this app because of all the cheesy butterfly or flower frames.

This image was created with the Symmetry Vertical filter. It basically copies the left half of the image and flips it to make a symmetrical image. There are 3 symmetry filters that might make for some interesting creations, but I don’t know if I’m going to keep this 20MB app on my phone just in case I want to use one of them once a month.

More Macro!

I gotta say I love exploring the world of macro. I was going to save this for tomorrow morning, but I really like this one, so I’ll share now. To provide a sense of scale, thats a water drop on the left side of the image. I got too close at first and the water on my lens rubbed off onto the flower…oops.

Its been windy lately and some of the anemone’s got blown over. Instead of trying to do macro work out in the wind, I snapped off one of the anemone’s that was laying on the ground, but still in good shape. I brought it into my bathroom, put the flower on the counter, and set my iPhone on a container of hair gel that was just at the right height to focus on the stamen. Then I took about 30 pictures with camera+.

Just a quick edit in Snapseed to crop, add a little drama and structure, and I was done. Their structure tool is pretty awesome in their photoshop plugins when it comes to pulling out detail in an image. I seldom use it in Snapseed with my iPhoneography because it also adds noise (grain) to the image. So, if you do use it, be careful not to overdo it.

Little Flowers

Just a little succulent blooming in the garden. It caught my eye in another part of the yard, but it was in shadows. I picked up the little bonsai planter its in and moved it into some more interesting light. Don’t be afraid to move your subjects to better light if you can!

 

Edited with Snapseed.