Isolation
The area of North Dakota where my mother grew up used to be fields as far as you could see. However, that has been changing the past several years. Water has been rising throughout the region. Roads have been cut off. Farms flooded out. Devil's Lake, Stump Lake, and Lake Lorretta have all overflowed their banks and inundated hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland. In many places instead of wheat fields, there are now plains of cattails stretching as far as the eye can see.
We saw this old, abandoned farm house on a small hill. It's fields taken over by Lake Lorretta. The county road we were on had obviously been elevated to stay above the lake water. Even then, it was only a couple of feet above the water.
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Old Warehouse
Earlier this week, we had our monthly for the Spartanburg Photography Guild. We met at the Spartan Photo Center store where Jonathan Stewart demonstrated HDR processing for us. I helped him out a bit by filling in with details when he had to concentrate on what was happening with his computer. We spent a bit of time around the shop photographing image sets to later process in to HDR images. This is one of the images that I liked although it was only a single image processed with Topaz Adjust 4's Dark-Ghostly filter. I thought it worked will for this old abandoned warehouse/building that was downtown.
We were just having some fun playing around.
Oh, and I'm also the webmaster for the club. Here is the link to the club's webpage. It isn't anything fancy, but it is a start at least.
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Brick Corner
One of the things that is fun to play with when taken photographs is Depth of Field, or DoF. DoF relates to the amount of the image that is in focus or appears to be in focus around the subject. The rest of the image may then fade to a blur depending on several factors or it may be "sharp" from front to back. Many landscapes will have large DoF so that the image is sharp all the way through. On the other hand, portraits and close-up photographs will have shallower DoF in order to draw the eye toward the subject and away from any distractions in the background; i.e, the subject will be sharp but the rest of the image will be blurred.
More after the jump.
To get a shallower DoF you can open up your aperture to as wide as it will go (small f/stop #). A smaller aperture (large f/stop #) will help get more of the image in focus. Zooming in to your subject can help narrow your DoF while using a shorter focal length will aid in getting more of the image sharp. The relative distance of your subject to the background is also important. If you are significantly closer to your subject relative to the background, then the subject will be in focus and the background will be more blurred. Conversely, if you stand farther away from your subject relative to the background, more of the image will be in focus. Of course you can use more than one of those techniques as well and it is a good idea to combine them for the best effect. Consumer zoom lenses, as an example, will usually not be able get an aperture wider than f/5.6 when zoomed all of the way out. This can give you more DoF than you might want and lead to background distractions. To combat that, set your aperture as wide as it will go (f/5.6 in this instance) and get as close as you can to your subject. Ideally you want to the background to be quite a bit further way from the subject than you will be to the subject. This will have your subject sharp, but the background fading off to a pleasing, non-distracting blurred field.
DoF is a property of photography that is used to help isolate the subject from the background as well as rendering a busy background less intrusive. Play around with DoF. It is can be a lot of fun.
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Antiqued Store Fronts
The texture image that I posted yesterday inspired me to try something that I had been thinking about for sometime now. I have been taking photographs of interesting textures so that I could use them as elements in other projects or images. For instance, they could make an interesting background for other photographs in a photo-book, or they can be used as layers in other images. The last is what I did with today's "photograph". Hit the jump to read more about it.
I started with a photograph of storefronts taken in downtown Spartanburg. Shown below:
Store Fronts
I opened a copy in Photoshop and converted it to black & white using an adjustment layer. In the B&W adjustment layer, I darkened the reds and blues to get some more contrast and pop to them. I also added the sepia tint, but selected a lighter tone than Photoshop's default as I thought the default looked to ... well, bad. Then I added a Curves adjustment layer to lighten the image overall to get the highlights closer to the blown out feel you see in old photograph. Finally, I added an edge vignette using the Lens Distortion filter again to get a similar effect to what is seen in vintage photographs.
With the photograph of the stores itself converted the way I wanted it to be, I turned to adding the in the "damage" effect to the image. I did this using the photograph from yesterday's post of the decorative stonework. The veining in that image looked to me like the water damage you might expect to see in a mishandled vintage photograph.
I opened the stone work photograph in Photoshop. Next, I selected the entire photograph using Ctrl+A and pasted it into the Store Front image as a new layer on top of the other layers. Of course, the stone photograph now blocked the store front photograph. I blended the two of them together via the opacity, fill, and blending mode settings. Initially, I set the blending mode to Overlay, then dropped the opacity down to about 40% and the fill down to about 50%. The effect seemed close, but not quite right. As I looked at it on my monitor, I released that one problem was that the veining in the stone work was white on a dark background. This gave the opposite effect than you would expect. To correct it, I selected the stone work photograph again then inverted it. This changed it to dark veining/streaks on a lighter, mottled background much closer to what I was wanting from the texture overlay. From here I just played around with the blending mode, opacity, and fill settings until I got an effect I liked. In the end, the texture uses the Hard Light blending mode, an opacity of 20-25% and a fill around 50%.
This was really just a quick trial intended to familiarize myself with the process. I like it though. I'll have to keep this technique in mind in the future. The only way that you really learn tools like Photoshop is to play around with them. Preferable when you don't have an important deadline breathing down your neck ... although that can certainly be a learning situation as well. ;-)
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A bit of Green
Another architecture shot from downtown Spartanburg. I could spend days photographing the details of buildings in towns. Oddly enough, I had never wanted to be an architect, but now I really enjoy the craftsmanship put into older buildings like this one. Professional photographers frequently say to shoot what you love. I'm not sure that I necessarily love old buildings, but I do admire some of them. I guess I'll keep photographing them. Who knows, someday I might actually get good at it. ;-)
Edit: I just found an article and slideshow about the National Trust for Historic Preservation's 11 most endangered historic places. Maybe these snapshots of mine can actually serve a purpose? Something for me to think about.
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W in the Sky
There are are a lot of interesting architectural details in the older buildings in downtown Spartanburg. I thought that this "W" inset was unique and it seemed to accent the blue sky and cloud above it. Many of the buildings now house different businesses than when they were first built making from some interesting juxtapositions. Quite a few of them are also empty. Skeletons from before the move out of the city center. I hope that many of the these older buildings will be reused as it would be a shame to loose these kinds of links to the past.
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White Spire in Blue and Green
Sunday seemed like an appropriate day to post this image taken while we were in downtown Spartanburg for the bike races.
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Irises and the Porch.
A shot of a couple of iris blooms near the back porch of Rose Hill Plantation. It seemed as if we were at the plantation between blooms. The roses had not yet come out in full, the dogwoods were loosing their petals, the magnolias either had not yet bloomed or had long lost them. However, there were a few irises along one of the walkways near the back porch. It kind of makes you think back to those days doesn't it?
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Rose Hill Plantation
Edit: I fixed the link to the larger image above.
This weekend we visited Rose Hill Plantation near Union, South Carolina. It was the home of former SC Governor William H. Gist. Gov. Gist was a staunch proponent of Southern States' secession from the US which eventually led to the Civil War. Because of this, he is known as the "Secession Governor". More after the jump.
Rose Hill Plantation got it's name from the rose and hedge garden that the governor planted around the house. It is indicative of the English box-hedge style garden which was popular among the wealthy of the period. Another distinctive feature of the gardens are the large magnolia trees which now obscure the front facade from the driveway. The trees are thought to be either children or grandchildren of original magnolias brought to the US and which now line the drive at the Augusta National Golf Course. When they were brought to the country, it was believed that they would only grow to about 15 feet high. The governor might not have planted them if he had known how tall they would have grown.
The plantation is now part of the South Carolina state parks system. There are tours of the house, several period out-buildings, a nature trail and large open lawns. A picnic shelter is available for rental as well.
I will post more photographs from the visit throughout the week.
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Cotton Grass
I went to Cleveland Park near Wofford College at lunch time. I had been getting stir crazy and needed some fresh air. On this visit I concentrated on the lake area near the Event House and Helvetia Island. In particular I thought I would practice some wide-angle compositions for both close-ups and scenic images. I'm not sure I'm completely happy with the photographs, but I still had a good time and it did help to clear my head a bit.
The shot above is from the edge of the park's overgrown, storm water retention pond. The pond feeds into the parks small lake, but is overgrown with cat-tails and other wet-environment vegetation such has the cotton grass.
A couple more after the jump.
Red Leaves Under Clouds
I was surprised that there was still some Spring-like color in the park. These bushes on the island had vibrant red leaves. You can see how gray the clouds were at the time. I think it makes for an interesting contrast.
Storm Shelter
I processed this image of the gazebo on Helvetia Island to try to give it a feeling of sheltering from a coming storm. I'm not sure that it worked out, but there it is. I desaturated the colors in the areas around the gazebo and added a dark, edge vignette while leaving the full colors of the gazebo and the vista beyond it to attempt to draw the eye into the gazebo.
There are a couple more photographs from the outing over at the Zenfolio site if you are interested in seeing more.
This weekend could be a busy one. There is a European automobile show at the BMW Zentrum that could be interesting to visit. The annual Fall for Greenville event is taking place in downtown Greenville, SC. The Spartanburg Symphony is giving a concert for children at Twichell Auditorium at Converse College. And those are all on Saturday. I think there might be something happening on Sunday too, but it has slipped my mind at the moment.
Anyway, hope you enjoyed today's images. See ya next week, have a good weekend and ... keep shooting.
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Caged
This past weekend we went to Charlotte, North Carolina to see the Pompeii exhibit at the Discovery Place museum. It was a nice trip and the exhibit was quite interesting. I didn't take my camera inside the museum. However, we got to the museum before they opened, and I was able to spend some time trying out different kinds of shots from the top of the museum's parking garage. The shot above is taken from the pedestrian bridge that connects the museum and the parking garage. I thought the dark foreground, fence and bright, inviting background made for an interesting juxtaposition especially as it directly over the road below.
There are a few other photographs taken of the skyline and nearby buildings over on the Zenfolio gallery.
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To start things off, here is a photograph I took this past weekend at the annual Greek Festival in Greenville, South Carolina. This is the dome of the St. George Greek Orthodox Church that hosts the festival every year. It is one of their major fundraisers.
Photon Talk: This isn't the greatest photograph of a church ever, but I liked it. It was also one of those "happy accidents" that sometimes happens. The accident was in when I adjusted my circular polarizing filter. I framed the dome for a symmetrical composition and exposed off of the white cupola. I then adjusted my circular polarizer until the sky when dark and snapped the picture. I did this as we were walking across the street and herding my seven-year old son. What I didn't realize at the time was that I had locked the exposure before adjusting the polarizing filter. You usually adjust the filter first so that your exposure doesn't get borked (That is one of the many technical terms I love to use, btw.) Well, when I opened the picture I was surprised that the sky was black. Not dark blue like I thought I'd gotten, but black like night. The neat thing about it though, at least as far as I was concerned, was that the cupola and crusifix seemed to glow against the constrasting dark sky.
Pixel Talk: What I did to process this was to use Nikon Capture NX to place a few color control points to reduce the glare on the dome, and to brighten the sky a bit so there was more of a deep, royal blue tone to it. An unsharp mask for a touch of sharpening finished it off.
Photon Tip: So, the take away from this for me? Experiment with your filters and exposure sequence. You might bork the shot, or you migh get something unexpectedly neat.
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