I was adding some feed to bird feeder, when I noticed this piece of ice below the table on my balcony. I snapped an image with an iPhone, and run some filters in Best Camera (you can check out the recipe here). Are you seeing any animal in that? I saw a fish with its mouth up, or a small critter sitting on its back with paws up.

A few weeks ago, we went to see how the water release is going in winter in Coralville Dam. We were looking for slow shutter speed images, I think, but were not very successful in capturing the power of water. However, the pattern of water made for an interesting image. I took some photos with “big camera”, and some with an iPhone. I decided to post-process the iPhone image. The recipe for the image can be viewed on BestCamera site.

Ice fishing is not as popular in Iowa as it is in Minnesota. But there are some fans, and several weekends ago when we were hiking around Coralville Lake and Lake Macbride, we saw some of the tents. When we were coming back towards the end of the day, the fisherman were preparing to leave their positions as well. I found the spot and was waiting for those to to position themselves against the sunset sun for this image.

When I took two images combined in the post photograph, I was not completely sure, what the result I want to achieve. The depth of field was very shallow, and I took one focused on the grass, and one focused on the rock. I combined them in Orton-type effect, which gave me this dreamy look. You almost see how the grass moves with the wind. But it was not all. I wanted some more, so I went for split-tone, spending some time balancing exact colors I liked.

We took a short walk around our neighborhood. Overnight, although it was not snowing, I think, the tress got covered in snow, so it was white not only on the ground, but also wherever you looked. Quite beautiful, indeed. This macro Lensbaby shot of the large snow flakes covered rope along snowmobile trail is my favorite of the day.
BTW, interesting tidbit in here, looks like yesterday all states but Hawaii were snow-covered.

I took this image a couple of weekends ago. We were walking along the lake not far from our home. We wanted to take some photographs of small waterfalls where the lake meets another reservoir, but it was frozen and not impressive at all. In the meantime, it was getting close to sunset, and I saw not only the amazing clouds on the sky, but also the sunset colors showing through the trees. I snapped several images, I loved what I saw, but it turned out to be a challenge to achieve the same effect on the photograph.

We finally managed to get some snowboarding this season, with weekends being mostly too cold so far. It was a great time off everything, just snow and me. But on the lift and when we were packing the car, I grabbed several shots with my iPhone. This is my favorite. We were taking some snaps of sunset with silhouettes of group of people, and we were happy with the results, when this girl came in the picture.

Another DPS monthly critique and edit challenge. Another picture not taken by me, only edited by me. This time, the task was far more difficult for me to approach, as on the first glance, I didn’t like the image at all. What was bothering me were the hanging pieces of fabric, worn and far too colorful to my taste. However, I operated under the assumption that they are there for a reason, and decided to go with them. Mostly because cloning them out requires too much patience, which I don’t have .

I looked at different cropping though,  and decided to put more focus on sky and the far right, highest peak. The easiest way to do it was to make it portrait. I opened shadows by making a the single image-HDR, and added a lot of blacks to recover lost contrast. A bit of vignette to put focus on snow-covered mountain and rags. The final touch was to lower saturation of reds (-67, not too much), which made the colorful rags less distracting.

I found several show-worthy images in my Konica Minolta collection from Vancouver, 3 years ago. This one was improved using the Contrast Layer Mask, as shown in this great video tutorial. Photographing sunset in Vancouver is not an easy task, because…. It is not positioned on the open Ocean. There are mountains, islands and bunch of other stuff, obstructing the view. So, you need to be creative.

My husband and I were visiting Canada some 3 years ago. We stayed there for a month, and although I was working on a scientific project, I was not working on the weekends and afternoons. Having a car, it was a great chance to get to know the region, and we took a whole advantage of it. We visited Vancouver, and took a ferry to Vancouver Island. On one of the weekends, we drove thew Sea to Sky Highway up to Whistler, where they just started to work on the Olympic Village. On the way back, we saw this beautiful waterfall from the road. It was impressive. It looked to me like it is starting at the top of the mountain. We stopped and took some photographs from close-by, but I still think it looked better from the distance.