I found this pond with water lilies in a restaurant, for all places. Of course it was not your usual dining-out place. It was one of those unknown in Midwest, and extremely popular almost everywhere in Poland fresh fish frying places. Almost all of them have their own fish (trout) farm, and in some you can even fish for your dinner. So, since they have water ponds, they may have another one, with water lilies as well. In fact, this one I found at the back of the establishment, when I took my camera for a closer look at the area.

Another crazy day today, and I almost forgot to post something on the blog. But since I was picking three images for Mike Moats macro contest, I decided to put here one of them. I took it a couple of weekends ago, when one evening we were watering my mom’s flowers garden. This particular plant’s leaves were keeping the water better then any other, creating a great photographing subject.

This image was taken previous weekend, on the same day I took the sunset photo. For the abstract image of water at sunset, I composed so there is nothing but water in the frame. And I started to play with white balance. That day, I was for the first time shooting without Auto White Balance setting on the camera, I picked the Sunny setting (I am shooting RAW, so whatever I chose, I can change, but at least I have some consistency among pictures). But I thought, let’s see how it would look like at different white balance settings. In fact, I liked the bluish setting the most. I still decided to add to the atmosphere of the image by introducing split toning. I added a bit of yellow to highlights, and just a little of blue to shadows.

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.

Found it in “old” files, from several weekends ago, when we were spending time in the beautiful lake region in North-Western Poland. Somehow I ignored that image then, now it drew my attention because the green color of the boat is just perfectly matching the green feel of the whole scene.

I looked at the series of images I took of this old boat on the lake critically, and they looked so boring at first. But there was some potential. I increases Clarity and Vibrance, as I usually do, but it didn’t fix it yet. And then I noticed, that the water behind the boat had a bluish color, but in front of it, shallow water revealed the yellow sand below. It gave me an idea of using two colored neutral density filters in Lightroom. I have to admit that I was impressed by the result of the quick fix.

I am spending this weekend in one of Polish lake regions. In South-Western part of Poland, there is locally popular but not widely known Slawa Lake, around which there is a number of smaller lake, creating very pleasant vacation area. We went for a ride yesterday in the evening. We were looking for a access spots to the lake and interesting views. The low hanging, dark clouds also added to this particular landscape. I used HDR to retain detail in those clouds, and at the same make all the trees well visible.

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.

With all the time on my hands this moths, I am trying my creativity. Which means finding in the house objects worth photographing and spending some time with them in the “studio”. I got some mixed effects so far, and the subjects are not that numerous. However, the afternoon spend with four glasses of water were successful. I was trying high and low angle, from the side and from the front of the row. I tried Lensbaby. And ended up with this as my favorite shot of the day.

The hour and a half pleasant hike in Calf Creek area takes you to beautiful Lower Calf Creek falls. You can admire rocky landscape, ruins of ancient granaries, some pictographs, and fish in the crystal clear creek. When you approach, you start hearing thunder of running water, when it drops 126 foot, and feel the cool breeze from the waterfall. In typical Utah weather, there is not a cloud in the sky. On a day like it, HDR comes in handy.

This image was taken here.