I do not know, what Tuesday is going to be on the blog .
Today is just going to be an inspiration from August Outdoor Photographer issue. There is a beautiful black and white photo of Antelope Canyon. It did not cross my mind to make a B&W out of those pictures, I am so addicted to this warm, pleasant shade of red of the Navajo sandstone. However, after looking at this photo of Elizabeth Carmel, I decided to give a try. I also thought of doing duotone, but nothing worked as well as B&W, which really brought the slot canyon down to highlights and shadows, shapes and texture of the rock.

I think I am going to introduce some more structure to my blog. I already have “Tomasz’s Saturday”, so today I am introducing “Gallery Monday”. Whenever I have a larger project, with more than one successful image, and I will want to put a gallery of images on the blog, I will do it within this series.
This particular gallery will link my photography with what Tomasz does, and how different our visions and techniques are. My subject is same as his- the bouquet of three different color roses. While he chose controlled background, flash and 30 mm lens, I decided on sunlight falling through the window (no reflector or diffuser) and Lensbaby (which is 50 mm), some with macro filters and some without it. On a side note, I love the fact that D300 allows to use lenses like Lensbaby, and just punch in the aperture I use, and enjoy the automatic exposure indicator.
I also used spray bottle, as Tomasz did,to improve interest in the images . Check the images for yourself here.

I am spending so much time polishing my Lightroom skills, that I am loosing my touch in Photoshop. If I had any to speak of. I wanted to take this photo, which I have take from the car, driving 65 mile/h on the Interstate, and made it into what I wanted it be. Lightroom could do, for such basic touch, but somehow it introduced more noise then originally was (and there was a lot, all right!). So I exported the image to Photoshop… and got stuck. Made Selection, and couldn’t figure out which Adjustment Layer to pick to do what I want… Disaster. It is another hour passing, and I am still on it. In the beginning. Third approach. Smart Objects maybe?
Another bunch of hours passed, and I am still at square one. How hard can it be to adjust separately two parts of an image!
All right, I am giving up. I have the effect, to some extent what I wanted. Some lessons learned.
1. Somebody could name consistently same things in Lightroom and Photoshop. After all, they are products of same company.
2. I like Smart Objects. With using Lightroom most of the time, I know when things are, and can find them in Camera Raw, even if named differently. Finding things in Adjustement Layers seems impossible without advanced help options.
3. Sometimes, what you consider simple, minor touch-up, turns out to be an afternoon-in front of a screen-for nothing day . Although I like the image.
4. This is exclusively to my husband - I need a “real” Mac…
I used Topaz Denoise plug-in for this one, and I think I will soon write something about plug-ins…..

Nice, isn’t it?

Iza complains that I should say something longer here to keep up with the tradition. Well then. This one was actually a little tough to take. I still didn’t mastered the Nikon’s CLS and I have problems with balancing foreground and background light. Actually the only way I was able to achieve what I wanted to get was to put the remote one in manual mode. Oh well, another million of takes and we’ll get there.

The project I was trying to get ready to blog about for almost couple of weeks was all about using a flash light for nature photography. We took our SB-800 for a trip to caves. You can see in the small gallery I posted (we have been rather taking a lot of photos of one place, changing flash position and settings, then changing a spot or composition), that some of images are taken inside, while others are taken outside, you can say in plain sight. And there was still a good use for a flash, to place the light right where we wanted to even the exposure. It was great fun, also in doing it together, as for a technical challenges.

I finally got to the photograph from the previous (previous to Photowalk) weekend another project. I wrote about wildflowers several days ago. I will write some more on the project Tomasz and me were working on probably tomorrow, but meantime we took also some infrared photos. Once we figured out how to do it, and how important appropriate filter is, I think I will be posting more infrareds. This one is minimally processed, I essentially only took care of white balance to render green leaves gray, and left sky yellow- the supernatural effect I really like.

This is another photograph taken during a Photowalk on Saturday, but I left it purposefully out yesterday. Because this image has its story, which I think should accompany it. Amber was sitting on Iowa City Pedestrian Mall with her human friend. She is a beautiful, very well groomed and behaved dog. She is also a seizure dog. When her human friend has a seizure, Amber calls help and stays put while the attack lasts. And just look how she observes her friend! What attentiveness and love in her eyes.

I thought it is going to be showing off on blogs here and there on Saturday and yesterday, but I was wrong. It started today. And I am going to contribute to it myself as well.
Scott Kelby’s Second-Annual Worldwide Photowalk was a quite an experience for me. First of all, I am not used to photograph around town, no am I interested in photographing people, and I haven’t tried doing that before. But during a Photowalk downtown (why are they downtown, anyway?), you either struggle with subjects, or you simply photograph people. Our walk started in local Farmers market, and when I was wandering around, looking on what people are selling, I was stunned by their welcoming reaction to my probing camera- “hey, have you taken a photo of my flowers” or “do you want to photograph my veggies”.
It was also a great time and fun meeting people sharing photography passion in my town, and after the walk to sit down and do some geek talks and share photographs.
I put a small gallery showing some of the photos I took during the walk. Some of them turned quite OK when treated in Lightroom, cropped here and there (somehow, the idea of taking just one lens and make it 50 mm did not turned out to be such a disaster).
Meantime, I think I will go and educate myself what other people have been shooting during their Photowalks, here and here. Although… I will probably forget by next year .

I am finally catching up with all my photo projects. I am very happy to find time to work on my small portfolio of photos I took last week in a park. I put it in a gallery, and I am thinking of printing a small book out of it as well. What is special about this project for me, is that it is one subject, photographed in one day in one location, using same lens. I had Sigma 30 mm f/1.4 lens, set up to… you got it, f/1.4.
It is quite interesting, how many photographers prefer wide-open to stepped down. And that hardly anybody likes anything about f/16. Which I am sure does not translate on many real-life situations- I can imagine that both shooting landscape and/people requires stepping down once in a while, at least?

I probably should introduce myself, but as my pictures has been posted here for a while already I’ll just mention that from now on I’ll try to not only provide pictures but also write texts for my ‘Saturday guest blog’ column.

It’s no secret that I’m very interested in light. So most of my pictures will be focused on lightning techniques. I’m no master by any measure but I’m trying hard to achieve results I imagined before I took camera in my hands. Sometimes though results surprise even myself.

Today I got inspired by one of the photos taken during world wide photo walk. It was a quill lighten with remote flash in a way that everything around it was pure black. I decided to try and do the same with nice, white fork stanchion of my new bike. I took our trusty SB-800, turned it to remote mode and started playing.

Well.. I took 194 pictures, out of which only four were more or less close to what I wanted to get. But neither of them didn’t have that thing in them that would leave me with ‘nicely done’ feeling. Fortunately there was another one, taken ‘by the way’ that got my attention.

It has this ‘unsettled’ feeling embedded into it. Light blinks on the rotor seem to say ‘just take us for a spin’. The shadows on the fork reveal more than hide. Brake caliper hiding behind it says ‘don’t worry, I’ll be here when you need me’. I probably should listen to it and go for a ride!