TADD: Bells and Soup

Barn Bell

Soup

Linking up with Rain's Thursday Art and Dinner Date.

All images © by Leigh at Leigh's Photography Journal

TADD: Cups

Joining up with Rain's Thursday Art and Dinner Date!

All images © by Leigh at Leigh's Photography Journal

November Walk in the Woods

Our autumn color is past its peak and more subtle now. The leaves are falling, and by the end of the month, most of the trees will be bare.

Linking up with Rain's Thursday Art and Dinner Date!

All images © by Leigh at Leigh's Photography Journal

TADD: Frosty

We had our first frost two weeks ago, so I've got some photos for Rain's Thursday Art and Dinner Date theme - Frosty!

All images © by Leigh at Leigh's Photography Journal

October Walk in the Woods

All images © by Leigh at Leigh's Photography Journal 

TAD: Colourful June: Silver & Gold

The theme for Rain's Thursday Art Date this week is silver and gold. Since I've been doing the "colourful June" series with photos of flowers and garden, I admit I was stumped about silver and gold. I usually think of these as metallic colors, although with flowers, golden yellow is sometimes called gold, or silver grey is sometimes called silver. 

After some pondering, I decided to exercise some artistic license and interpret silver and gold metaphorically. So, I present to you, my homestead silver and gold.

Compost is truly garden gold.

Homegrown eggs and milk.

The garden.

The fruit of our labors.

Winter warmth.

Honestly? These things are worth more to me than money in the bank. 

These are our homestead silver and gold.

All images © by Leigh at Leigh's Photography Journal

TAD: Colourful June: Purple

 June purple from my garden for Rain's Thursday Art Date.

All images © by Leigh at Leigh's Photography Journal

TAD: Colourful June: Red

Joining up with Rain's Thursday Art Date.

My interest in photography is primarily in documentation, so my aim is to make my photographs as accurate as I can in terms of getting them look like what my eyes see. Cameras don't see the same as human eyes, so learning how to take real-looking photographs has been a goal. However! Rain's Thursday Art Date gives me an opportunity to explore photography as an artistic medium. I can experiment with settings and software editing in ways I otherwise wouldn't! Very fun.

Last week's lesson in my online photography course was Advanced Edits. That link will take you to what I learned and my homework assignment. I continued to play around with it and here's what I came up with to share for TAD.

All images © by Leigh at Leigh's Photography Journal

AYWMC: Part 5 Editing. Lesson 4: Advanced Edits

This post is part of a series entitled A Year With My Camera.

Lesson 5.4 in my own words

• Split Toning
• Changes the colors of dark tones and highlights separately.
• In darkroom developing, it adds a golden sepia tone to black and whites.
• With digital developing (editing), any color can be used.
• Lightroom updated split toning to "color grading."
• Graduated Filter
• A type of neutral density filter (from "What is an ND Filter and Why You Need One.")
• A filter is a glass or resin camera lens attachment that impacts light hitting the camera's sensor.
• Examples: UV filter, polarizing filter, etc.
• An ND filter
• Reduces the amount of light hitting the camera's sensor.
• Allows wider aperture and longer shutter speed in bright conditions.
• In editing software, it applies an exposure adjustment in the form of a gradient.
• It's like a sheet of clear plastic graduated from black at the bottom to clear on top and placed over an image.
• Very useful for bringing back detail to blown out skies in RAW images
• RAW images retain information about the details of the clouds
• JPEGs discard that information when processing the image.
• Cloning
• How to deal with dust, specks on an image, annoying highlights, or other distractions.
• Samples one area of an image and allows you to paint over the flaw.
• Done with "clone" or "heal" tools.
• Vignette
• Darkens the area around the subject.
• Can draw subtle attention to the subject of the photo.
• Be careful not to overdo.

This week's project

• Pick one or two of the advanced edits to experiment with.
• Don't worry about trying to keep the edits realistic yet. The point of the module is to learn what your editing software can do.

Graduated Filter. This was the first technique I wanted to try. And I knew exactly what image I wanted to experiment with. It's one I took for my homesteading blog last month. The subject was muscadine vines growing on the pergola. The day was sunny and the sky was blue with white and grey clouds. The photograph however, made the sky look like a high overcast. Nothing I tried in GIMP could fix it. 

Original JPEG produced by my camera.

The I loaded the RAW version of the image into RawTherapee, my RAW editing software, and started to experiment.

RAW image corrected with the graduated filter.

That second photo looks like what I actually saw! Even though it's been edited with computer software, it's the more accurate image of the two.

Vignette. I understood this better when I started playing with the tool. The first image below is without the effect applied, the rest are gradually increasing it.

Original unedited image.

Vignette effect applied.

A little more.

And a little more.

Split Toning. Sometimes called "color toning." It is called "color correction" in RawTherapee. This is another one I had to experiment with to understand. For my image, I chose cloudy sky, because everybody knows what sky is supposed to look like. 

Original unedited image.

Here are my experiments. The assignment said not to worry about realism, so I didn't. 

Hue adjusted. (I went for wild!)

Then I adjusted highlights.

Shadows adjusted.

Lastly, mid-tones adjusted.

I didn't experiment with cloning, because I'm already familiar with it. 

What I learned

• The graduated filter is extremely useful. I thought my problem with the washed out sky was due to my lack of camera skills, but now see it's a limitation of the camera. I know I'll use this in the future.
• Vignette is nice to know about, but I doubt I'll use it much.
• The Vignette feature in RawTherapee is much more subtle than the one in GIMP.
• Split toning is interesting, and I can see using it for artistic versions of images. 
• I think a lot more can be done with the split toning, but that's more advanced than I can comprehend at the moment.
• Because I think of my photography as accurate record keeping, so I'm not sure I'll use this feature much. 

All images © by Leigh at Leigh's Photography Journal