One Photo Focus June 2016

The original image for this month’s One Photo Focus was taken by David Croker and is a lovely shot of peaceful serenity; who doesn’t like the combination of sky, water and reflections?

David Croker original

The only problem with this original is that the air of tranquility is jarred somewhat by the electricity pylons running right across the horizon. I realise that it’s possible to remove such intrusions through various photo editing programs,including Photoshop, which I have myself, but it looks like a very painstaking exercise, particularly if (a) you haven’t done it before and (b) when there are not only wires but also the pylons to be erased.

Then I recalled that for a WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge some time ago, with the theme of ‘Dreamy‘, I had used a reflected image to get the dreamlike look that the assignment called for, and I thought it had worked quite well.

Accordingly, I adopted the same principle for this One Photo Focus, to produce this:

One Photo 0616

Here’s what I did:

  • Flipped the image horizontally
  • Cropped to remove the sky – and therefore the power pylons and cables. I also wanted to highlight that cloud on the right of the original image, so cropped out the whole of the left half
  • After that, it was simply a matter of adding a little ‘punch’ in Lightroom, and also adjusting colour Luminance to make the green and blue of the reflected boats stand out more.

I’m quite pleased with the dreamy, painting-y effect of this revised version

One Photo Focus June 2016

Weekly Photo Challenge: Vivid

Here’s one I’d completely forgotten about. This was taken with a compact camera at my daughter’s wedding reception almost ten years ago. Technically, of course, it’s a shocker (the metadata tells me that the exposure was half a second).

In mitigation, though, it was getting quite late by then and a fair amount of champagne had been consumed. Plus the composition – quite accidentally, of course – is quite pleasing.

And it’s nothing if not vivid.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Weekly Photo Challenge: Vivid

Weekly Photo Challenge: Blur

This image was taken as part of an assignment on a ‘Beginners’ photography course I took in Abu Dhabi. The technique involves mounting a camera with a zoom lens on a tripod, setting a long exposure and then rotating the zoom while taking the picture. Obviously it works best at night, as here, and it does provide some vey arresting, Matrix-like images.

Blur-2

WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge: Blur