February 3, 2009

I am a little late getting this week's post up as we had a busy social calendar and I was having difficulty getting good photos. On the one occasion we expressly set out to take photos, we drove to the beautiful little town of Elora, situated twenty minutes north-east of Waterloo. The town is full of great architecture and a giant old mill sitting at the precipice of a waterfall that runs into the spectacular gorge. Sounds ripe for photo taking doesn't it? Unfortunately, most of the interesting stuff down in the gorge was inaccessible and shrouded in shadows. We had a great hike around town and the gorge but photographically speaking, it was a bust. Here are a few shots from that day http://www.pbase.com/bob_n/elora_walk. What lessons can a draw from the experience? Well, I broke the rule regarding shooting mid-day and should have known better. Secondly, the gorge has only about half an hour a day where light reaches the bottom. Next time I will plan better.
I continue to experiment with still life's and this is the best from the week.

This one was really difficult! Most digital cameras do not like red and tend to blow out that channel very easily. For this image I took five exposures, continually underexposing until the red channel was no longer blown. I then loaded them as layers from Adobe Bridge into Photoshop where I lowered opacity levels until I had the tonality I wanted. Next, I used the “select colour range” tool to mask out the background as best I could and then bring it down to near black

Yet another still life:

This morning as I was having breakfast and noticed that we were having one of those majestic snowfalls. Previously, Rebecca and I had discussed placing flowers in the snow as an experiment and this morning seemed like an opportune time. Here's the result:

And finally, what would a week be without another bird shot.

Have a good week.

Bob