I am going slowly through my Photowalk pictures. It seems I took some interesting images after all. Good, that I have time till next Saturday to pick my one favorite, looks like my top favorite while shooting might not end up being send for the contest .
Meantime, one of the images I like a lot, but probably will not end up being send out. What I enjoy about this image is the line of street lamp, and a lot of negative space which make the image simple and at the same time, draw the eye where I want it- to the birds. And the fact that although each has its own pose, all pigeons are turned at the same direction, making the image… organized.
I took the series of bracketed exposures hoping to put them into HDR image to show all the nuances of shades in the feather detail in the birds. I also hoped for some detail in the sky, but in this moment it was evenly clouded . But even with high ISO, the shutter speed and burst mode where not enough to freeze the unsettled birds. Not to abandon the idea completely, I use the single-image pseudo HDR. This image is a natural B&W .

I was sightseeing some yesterday in the town of Czestochowa in South-Central Poland. One of the places I spend couple of hours was a very well known catholic monastery, where I took a number of pictures. I am planning to talk about that place when I post those. Today’s blog image was taken outside, on the entrance sidewalk. The place is very busy every time of a day, every day, so the birds are very used to people and not easily scared. I was able to walk quite close to this one. It was observing me, all right, but probably looking more if I will give it any food then expecting troubles. Notice the colorful spots on its neck- I really like them.

This is an image of, I think, a bird called common kestrel, or Falco tinnunculus, simply pustulka in Polish. It was a challenge to identify it, so if I made a mistake, let me know!
I took it last weekend in Szczeliniec, while we were hiking in the beautiful area of Table Mountains (Gory Stolowe). I was busy photographing the panoramic view from one of the viewing areas, when somebody noticed this bird, flying to his nest in the rock. I turned and snapped this image quickly, so I am rather surprised how well it turned. It was shod in the middle of the day in really sunny weather. But with a basic post processing, I was able to make the bird the lightest object on the image, and stand out from all the green trees. I also love how the trees went blurry, when I zoomed the lens to its max 200 mm. With a longer lens (or cropping) I might have made a bird more pronounced on this image, but I like this as an environmental shot. See, if you can spot its nest a little lower and to the right of the bird.

This peacock, called Kubus, leaves in a botanical garden in Walbrzych, South-Western Poland. He was actually a very funny bird, because when you called him by his name, he would spread his beautiful tail and start posing to the pictures! His handler was a very pleasant person as well, as he invited us outside the glass house where peacock resides, to his outdoors aviary, and take some pictures through bigger crate (so that you can put lens through, without tricks to make it disappear). Unfotunately, the grey concrete wall was not a perfect backdrop, and I am glad I gave up the whole body shots and went for close-up. They give justice to beautiful colors of Kubus’ tail.

I took a short, unannounced break from blogging last week. I spend the extended weekend with my family, enjoying finally summer weather. Luckily, there was many photographic opportunities along the way, so there is stuff to pick up for blog today. One evening, my husband and I went to photograph sunset on the lake. There probably would be nothing unusual about it, except it was the first time there was actually sun, no clouds or rain, a real possibility of capturing something interesting. We went about an hour before actual sunset, which gave plenty of time to explore the surroundings of Poraj lake. It was a Friday evening, in a middle of long, 4 day weekend, so there was a lot of people picnicking, walking, fishing. I think this image shows well the atmosphere on the lake this evening, the symbiosis of nature and human, the gulls and fisherman. And the calmness of the moment.
For this shoot, I also took another step into going full manual, and set White Balance from Auto to Daylight, and achieved those beautiful warm colors, rich red sunset feeling.

Disclaimer for locals- yes, I removed the power line. It was double and single line, right in the middle of the sky. I was struggling if I should do it or not, and decided to brush it out. It was distracting.

I spend most of weekend preparing photograph for submission to the Iowa State Fair Photo Salon. Sounds serious, doesn’t it . I was far more into contests last year, I guess this year more time goes into stock submissions. The thing is, these are different criteria to pick images. In any case, it made me to browse through last years images, and I discovered at least one real good one not featured on the blog yet . This photo of bald eagle was taken in Toledo Zoo.

The last winter images, hopefully. The snow is gone, but we still have the bird feeder out and full. We bought this winter different type of seeds than usual, and it brought different, more sophisticated bird species to it, but they also were less hungry or there was less of them. We put it out, needed to refill it two months later, and more then half of it is still there. For taking.

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.

I am looking through the few shots I took in Davis, California last week. Not enough for a gallery, but I will probably put few on a blog. This is one of my favorites, the way it turned out. It was done towards the evening, but it was still enough light to fool the meter when shooting up in the sky. The effect is a nice silhouetted bird on the silhouette of the tree. Apparently, turkey vultures have a favorite spot in one of the city parks, close to the river, as I was passing them all those times I was out with my hosts and their dogs. I actually turned the shot Greyscale, but there was hardly any color before that!

This is another of my “lost” picture. It seems that if you use a color-tinted filter, you should be able to “fix” your white balance… Apparently, not always or not quickly. But… In the process, something catchy can come out of it, like for today’s post.