A friend borrowed us some photo equipment for weekend. Cannon camera body and some lenses. Including fisheye. I admit- I wanted it for one sole purpose – to harass our cat. But I got addicted. I just love it lens. It is so much fun. Oh, I know, everybody was repeating it to me today:” ..but it distorts.” Well, that’s the puropose! What’s wrong with you people…. I just can wait what great photos I can do outdoors. Indoors I already photographed every room, some few times, ceiling, plants, cat, husband… You name it.

I am tapping again into my archives, this time something from trip to Poland. We had a lot of time, so we were taking walks with camera and looking around for interesting subjcets. Like this raw of color bee houses.

I just spent few hours preparing a composition of few images, and it just wasn’t working out. So I went through old photos to find something decent for todays post. And this one actually interested me. It was hidden between four or five other photos of the same church, with different settings, more detail and color. But I still like this one the most, just with the hint of color from setting sun.

It seems I have not been abusing my favorite Utah photos too much on my blog yet. I am not saying that you need to go to an interesting place to take interesting photos. But I think it helps. OK, going to popular places results in photos like everybody else’s, at least most of the time. But.. Well, for exmple unique sky and clouds I can see from my window every other day. There is just nothing to accompany them.

Anyway, back to Turret Arch. It was our last hiking trail for the day, beautiful worm February afternoon. Sun was still rather high, but we could have positioned ourselfs just to take this photo.

We went yesterday biking in Sugar Bottom, and I was supposed to photograph bike, biker and trail. Well, I did, and few photos are decent, although not what I planned them to be. But as usual, some wildlife can be spotted over there. What was on that list? Squirrels, chipmunks, snakes, rabbits, mosquitoes, deers….

This deer even had a decency to wait for me to stop, get off the bike, change lens to tele, and start shooting. But this photo, when he decided- enough is enough- I find it the most enjoyable.

Few days ago, I voluntarily went to take photos of planes. It looks this time I voluntarily went to board one. I am scared of planes and flying. But when we took off and reasonably cooled down, I looked around, took out camera and started to shoot. The weather was beautiful, the visibility limited by humidity in the air, sun reflecting from water droplets.

I need to work some more on my photo journalism skills- I was trying to take some photos of large event in town yesterday, and it was just a disaster. None of them seem to be good or interesting enough to show off. Luckily, I am not nearly as bad with cars, and planes.

One afternoon this week, we went with my husband to look around the airplane club he belongs to, and I was taking a lot of photos of planes. I made myself use telephoto instead of wide-angle, to make it more interesting, but also harder for me. I usually avoid telephoto, mostly because I cannot keep it steady enough. But this turned out OK, and this is my husband’s pick.

When you go to Minnesota, you end up photographing lakes, right? Well, with my luck, I had quarries and waste water treatment plant reservoir. At least there were ducks, which make this panorama more… alive. Anyway, even without tripod, but with “frozen” focus and manual settings, same on all 3 pictures I took, I was able to put together a nice view. Photoshop’s PhotoMerge function makes it easy to stich them seamlessly. I cropprd it a bit tighter, and here we go.

Rarindra Prakasa and his way of turning images (into) gold was already a subject of my post some time ago. I placed links to forum with details described then. It turned out to be quite popular in Google .

I decided to give the technique another shot, give another photo the fairy tale look. This image is quite different and I spend a lot of time playing with and adjusting the original recipe, deciding finally to do the solid color fill layer on the background only, excluding the horse. It just looked too pale after all layers applied. I did not want to loose the brown hue, and a horse stands out now even better.

This time, no Photoshop tricks, even no Lightroom adjustments. Pure and innocent as they came out of the camera. All I used was on-camera Bower Circular Polarizer filter to add or remove some of the granite rocks under water in Quarry Park in St Cloud, Minnesota. Two settings of filter, two different photos.