I guess it is high time to reveal the secret of the abstract photo from this post. Regine, you were very close, the picture shows a window. It was actually a row of keyhole shaped windows in the hall of African Mammals in American Museum of Natural History in New York. The tree like shape on the window comes from shades made from wicker, thus it might make you think of a tree.
Here is another view of the windows. I was photographing from dark inside of the room to the bright midday outside, thus the windows are only silhouettes, blurred in corners by Lensbaby (right again, Regine!).
Next post is number 400. Who would think….

Last week, just about time everybody and their mother was doing Christmas shopping, we got ice storm. I just love photographing trees covered with ice. I only took few snaps with iPhone, planning on going out next morning with “big brother” camera, but before I got up, the warmer front came and it all melted.

This was really busy year for me, photographically that is. I was taking far more pictures every week than I was able to process. I am browsing through last years part of my Lightroom catalog, discovering images and series of images I did not have a chance to post on the blog. I am just making notes of all the galleries I can put together, if and when I have time to process all this stuff.
This week gallery is a collection of images we took last spring, when visiting Chicago with my parents. It was a hectic time when they were here, and I think I did not post for several weeks. All those nice images disappeared in the bulk.
There is a story behind the shoot- we took the Architecture Cruise in Windy City twice already. Both times in April. One at the beginning, one at the end. Both times, it was raining with temperatures around 40F. Not a great photo weather.

Winter in Iowa. Temperature somewhere around 20F. Wind chill somewhere around 0F. You do not really want to do anything outside, but it is holiday and long weekend, and after day 4 you really cannot find anything to do inside anymore. At least snow came, finally, so we decided to move from the living room and try finding something to photograph close to home. What we ended up being successful was making miles, but there are few interesting keepers. This one happened when we drove through Iowa City, around the university campus, and the sun was getting ready to set, with already lower, orange light.

Inspired by some food photography blog that Iza sent me link to I’ve decided to take advantage of the moment (Christmas feast, remember?) and practice some food photography. Picking something to shoot wasn’t all that hard – there is plenty of interesting dishes on the table. But I’ve chosen Kutia. It’s traditional eastern Poland (so eastern that it no longer is Poland) dish made out of wheat, poppy seed and a lot of nuts, almonds and raisins. Back then it was a highlight of Christmas table. As a side effect it has really nice texture which you can play with while shooting.

Merry Christmas, everybody. One more, even more Christmas themed image for a post today. Hope everybody has a calm holiday break.
Hopefully, the weather here will finally decide onto one of rain/ice/snow and I will be able to get out of the house and take some holiday lighting displays before people take them out . I need to move to burn some of overeating yesterday.

In my tradition, the Christmas Eve supper is the time when the holidays start. So we have been cooking since morning, getting traditional dishes ready for a huge meal. I took a break to photograph Christmas tree, and poinsettia, and all the decorations, when Ace decided to play with me and the camera for this nice Christmas photo.

Something new on a post today. It is not a guest post per say, but featured image was not taken by me. I decided to take part in Digital Photography School Monthly Edits challenge, and instead of just posting a comment on the web page with the final image, I decided to write a post on my blog about how I achieved the final effect.
I basically like the image and how it was post-processed. I love the colors, and I though I will try to make them pop up as well. What I wanted to tackle is how the mountains disappear in the distance. I want to see their shape distinct rather then bare suggestion they are there, and it is a main reason I decided to take part in the challenge. Overall, the image lacks contrast in the top part.
I spent three evenings trying to make it “my way”. I started from basic black and white conversion, which was not interesting at all. Then I tried a single image HDR to recover some of the mountains and maintain detail in the bird, but I created just too much noise and overall did not like the result. I tried to add a split-neutral density filter on top part, and I wasn’t able to recover as much as I wanted before the noise set in, but it felt like I was onto something.
In this moment, I created several virtual copies and was just going through sliders, and I had hard time recreating what I did when I had a final image. So I had to go back and start from the beginning, writing down each step.
First I took the image to Photoshop as Smart Object, made a copy of a smart object, and using Camera Raw, adjusted top copy to +1 and the bottom copy to -2. The top layer blending mode I chose to set to Overlay, by trial and error. It worked, I had enough detail in the mountains. I actually just saw the trick on Photoshop User TV episode 211. I made another copy of the smart object with Exposure as it was originally, created a layer mask of the shape of the bird, and with Normal blending mode, lowered the opacity to 37% to lighten the bird without it being to obvious. Uff, it was complicated.
Back in Lightroom, I added some Clarity and Vibrance and placed a graduated filter on the sky. I made it -0.6 stop and added an orange color, picked from the sky itself. Another graduated filter, light blue, I added to the bottom part. I cleaned few spots (probably post-processing artifacts) and added +0.5 in exposure to the whole image. I also cropped the image so the bird was in one of nodal points of rule of thirds grid. To finish off, I added some post-crop vignette and sharpened a bit.
It would be it, if I didn’t try to turn it black and white again, and discovered that the color in my graduated filters was preserved in the conversion.
You can see the original image, the final full color version, and my favorite, colored black and white.

When you are in a car, not driving, the down time can be used very efficiently sometimes . I went through my iPhone Camera Roll and all the photo apps I have, looking for… Nothing really. Just passing time. But the effects were stunning in few cases.
The blog image I took last week in New York. Rockefeller Center in the evening presents a lot photographic opportunities, and iPhone did as good job as a “big” camera. I used BestCamera app to “improve the image”, and thanks to BestCamera web page upload, I can even tell what I did .

This past weekend, my husband mainly, but me some as well, put a lot of work in organizing the galleries on my blog. We created a separate page, where all Monday Galleries can be browsed, and you can click on the image to open a gallery and view all the images in there. I am going to be adding new galleries I publish on the blog right there as well. He also did this wonderful changing header. Thanks!
On the occasion, I realized that I have some galleries in the folder which were not linked to blog posts, and decided to publish at least some of them. Today’s gallery was made last spring, in a Mexican restaurant in Cedar Rapids, where I went with a friend of mine, who was takings shots for a menu. When he was busy photographing his assignment, I was shooting from the side with my Lensbaby. I did some additional editing today, before publishing this gallery- after all, I learned some more about post-processing in last 9 months .