I already mentioned Lightroom 3 on this blog, but it was somehow in passing. I am going to write some more now. The reason I came back is the noise around noise reduction in new CS5, or more exactly, in Camera Row. Well, same noise reduction is in Lightroom 3 beta, I figured. And what prompted me to need it at all was discovery of beautiful images I took almost a year and a half ago, with my Nikon D40x in Smoky Mountains. Too many of them didn’t make it to blog, and I feel it is a shame. So I looked at them, and right away saw two things – wrong white balance (I mentioned that D40x had a problem with automatic setting, compared to D300) and noise. I mean, I saw the noise on those photos, so it must have been real bad. Knowing that new algorithm is supposed to work magic, I imported all the images to LR3 beta 2 and started working on them. And you know what? It is freaking amazing!
Just look at the image before and after (you can click on the image to see it a bit bigger).

Maybe the after image has a bit too painterly effect, but overall the whole grain and noise from my camera is gone.
And here is the final image, a small waterfall somewhere on the Arch Rock Trail in Smoky Mountains.

The iPhone photo post is my favorite of the week. It is the easiest to choose photographs, and play a bit with different apps. I used two for this one- I start to enjoy Photogene, to correct exposure, colors etc, but I still need CameraKit to add my watermark and resize it. Anyway, I took this photograph sometimes this week- it is a first week this season I am getting out of work when it is getting dark. This particular day, it was not only already dark, but I noticed a moon between the street lights. You can tell which one is which- look at the colors of highlights.

I took this image in my parents house. My Mom has all those plants around the place, inside and on the stairs. The heather, collected probably around the yard (the house is in the woods), looked like a good photograph. I used Camera Kit app and red post-processing filter to make the colors pop. I have so many different app, but when I start working on an image, I tend to start from basic .
Anyway, I love the feeling of texture in the image, and the resulting colors, and I feel that that grain is something coming out of every iPhone photo, and it just looks good on some images.

It is time to change colors on blog a bit. End of last week was rather orange. I got myself talked into flying for lunch to small town of Pella, Iowa, and not during annual Tulip Time. But the place is still nice, with windmills, colorful houses, neat and… well, in middle of Iowa farmland, if you know what I mean. And with bright fall day, HDR was in order.

I just love this image so much, I cannot resist sharing it on blog. It is one of the completely unexpected images coming out of “I have no creative idea” afternoon. I hit the town to get some photos for a contest, and was just driving around (yeah, I know. But it is Midwest), clueless, stopping here and there, taking images without giving it a second thought. I was quite surprised what I saw when I opened them at home, and this was my all day favorite. I wanted to take an image of the particularly colorful tree from behind it up, and it turned out that shooting from inside the crown out was better idea .

It seems like orange colors of pumpkin is now everywhere. On Saturday, I was photographing a pile of pumpkins on the airfield. Yes, I got it right- on a local airport! Of course it is a part of a longer story, but the bottom line is- they are ubiquitous now. First I thought that photographing it as HDR is an overkill, but I do like the effect.

Since my husband got his pilot license just before our trip home, I am getting used to idea of us flying somewhere. Or around. Flying as means of transport or flying as another way to photograph world. Or both. Sounds great, right? Well, not exactly, as I am very uncomfortable on board. So to start working on getting used to, we took a short trip around home airport this weekend. I did it once before, but this time I think images are much sharper and also clearer. It has to do with weather, and the humidity in the air. In either case, check out a gallery of Iowa from above. I think it gives a different view on fall foliage.

I took this Orton-effect style image several weeks ago in Reiman Gardens. It is in fact a combination of two images, one sharp and the other blurred by defocusing the image. The photos were combined in Photoshop to create that dreamy, moody effect.

I almost forgot how to blog. Yeah, I know, my blog have been updated last two weeks, but the truth is I set it up before we took off for a trip to visit family back in Europe. I was not blogging for a week and a half. It was rather photographs trip, and I will soon start blogging about my  new experience gained in the field of image taking with serious business potential . But before I have time to organize all the photographs, a simple food and fall related image- wild mushroom. This character was growing on my parents property in the woods. The image is unprocessed and was taken, not surprisingly, with my iPhone.

Last Saturday it was snowing in Iowa. The leaves just started to turn yellow and red, and already got covered in snow. We have been running some errands just before our trip for a family wedding, and I grabbed this photo on the street.