Brush off the Rust
Well, today will be short but sweet. It’s been months (literally) since my last post, but this confession comes with a disclaimer. I have recently moved overseas from Japan. A major life upheaval, which, oddly enough, interrupted my blog time, not to mention my editing time, my photography time, my internet connection and well… pretty much everything else, too. In short, the portrait aspect of my work is on hold indefinitely seeing as I don’t know a single soul around here!
So I will seek to entertain you with a random collection of semi-inspiring shots taken from the past few months on the road… I would love to share the editing process with you, but I’ve been chastised by texture artists for showing their raw products (even at low resolution) on my blog. So You will just have to take my word for which texture I used and why.
I’ve learned a lot (though not nearly enough) about photographing the moon. For starters… BE PREPARED. As usual, I was not… prepared, that is. But as the gorgeous full moon came up over the ocean, I raced for my camera, switched out the dead battery, changed the lens, moved the tripod foot from the D200 to the D700 (after frantically searching for my alan wrench), dug out my tripod and raced back to the beach. In that short time, the moon had already sailed high above the horizon into the sky, so I grabbed a few shots, at varying apertures and speeds (again, not prepared…) It was literally minutes before the moon as too high to capture it reflecting on the water. The next nights were cloudy and so I’ve had to work with what I’ve got. Textures to the rescue!!!
Here’s a three step process. 1.SOOC. 2. Color texture 3. Grunge texture and watermark
1.SOOC (25.0 sec f/10 62 mm) I wanted the water to be the focus, and still keep the grass semi-sharp in the foreground. I also had the white balance set to daylight so the tones would be cool
2. Texture overlay, Blossom by Jessica Drossin. Sorry, I can’t show it to you, but it’s beautiful AND it has purple in it! I did run a Gaussian Blur filter on it before overlaying.
3. Texture by Sarah Gardner. I purchased a texture bundle off her site, and instead of names, they all have numbers. This one is SJGPTexture_04. I’m not sure which collection that’s in, but all of her textures are simply gorgeous! I chose this one because it was grayscale and had visible brushstrokes. I wanted to create a painted art effect without changing the colors. Grayscale textures will not change the hues, but they can change the value (darkness or light) so adjusting the levels or curves helps restore the original images’ light balance.
I also added a watermark with my new logo design to the finished piece.
Beautiful as always!