Prestwood Sunrise

Prestwood Sunset

Here is a photograph of a sunset over Lake Prestwood during my visit to Hartsville. I wish there had been some nice clouds in the sky. The next evening had a beautiful sky, but I was driving back home by that time.

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Still around

World War I Memorial Panel

There hasn't been very much of interest happening recently. I did visit my folks over the the Thanksgiving weekend. Hartsville had dedicated a new veterans' memorial in the town. There is a bronze panel sculpture for four of the major wars the US fought in during the 20th century (WWI, WWII, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf). This photograph is part of the World War I panel. We were there late in the afternoon and the sun was coming in from a low angle giving nice definition to this particular panel.

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Profilin'

Profile

Another hummingbird on one of my parents' feeders. I thought it was interesting how the little bird's entire profile fit inside the profile of the clothesline pole. The pole is maybe an inch in diameter to give you an idea of how small the bird is.

I think that to get better photographs of them, that I might need to set up the camera and flash closer to the feeder. Then I would have to trigger them remotely. That way the birds wouldn't be spooked by the nearby humans. I've seen other photographers do similar things. Or I could set-up a blind like a hunter would. That would get very hot in the summer though.

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Slow Week

Hummingbird

It is going to be slow on the blog this week. An old friend of mine passed away last week. Plus, there are several other little things going on. My son is visiting my parents, which meant I had to drive him down there the other day. We will pick him up in a few more days. However, while I was at my parents I did manage to get a couple of shots of their hummingbirds. They are difficult little buggers to photograph; fast, skittish and small. The fact that the neighbors were all mowing their lawns and wacking their weeds when the birds liked to come to the feeders didn't help. I will have to keep trying to get better photographs of these little beauties.

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Pink in Spring

Pink Blooms

I had to fall back on something from early in the month for today's photograph. So, here are some some pink flowers from Kalmia Gardens. Flowers always say "Spring", don't they?

I have been practicing some portrait lighting with my son modeling for me. However, I'm not happy with the results yet. Practice, practice, practice. I'll get the hang of this people picture-taking thing yet.

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New Black & White Method

Grown-up Cypress Knees (B&W)

The latest episode of Photoshop User TV had a black & white conversion method that I had not seen before. So, I went back to my images from Kalmia Gardens in Hartsville, SC to find a candidate on which to test the new technique. The image above is the result of about 15 minutes of playing around with it. Thus, far I think I like it better than what I had been doing to convert to black & white. More after the jump.


The method uses the HSL color panel in either Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) or Adobe Lightroom. To set it up, you go go to the HSL panel (HSL stands for Hue, Saturation, and Luminance), then to the Saturation sub-area. Here you desaturate all of the color ranges to give you your starting black & white (i.e. grayscale for you more technical types). From this point, you can still use the Luminance area to either brighten or darken the particular color ranges that you want to affect. I.E. if you have a lot of blue sky, you can darken the sky by using the Blue color range slider. Other methods of converting to black & white that I have been using prevented using some of these tools. So, I though it would be interesting to try it this way. Again, I think this has more potential then what I had been doing. Another advantage / trick is that you can use the HSL Targeted Adjustment Tool in ACR or Lightroom if you only know the particular area that you want to adjust but don't know which color range(s) that would need to be used. The Targeted Adjustment Tool will sample the colors in the "original" and adjust those as you mouse up or down. Kind of neat actually.

For this particular image, I noticed that the yellow and green color ranges seemed to dominate the image. For the final adjustments I darkened the green color range, lightened the yellow color color range quite a bit and also lightened the orange range just a touch. Other adjustments included a custom tone curve for contrast, a custom White Balance adjustment to further accentuate the yellows and greens, plus increased clarity and vibrance. A few slight tweaks were also made with an adjustment brush to darken a couple of problem areas. A slight vignette was then added to accentuate the mood of a dark swamp.

Overall, I'm happy with this first try using this new conversion technique. I have set the initial HSL desaturation as a pre-set so that I can apply it quickly. Plus, as my memory ages a pre-set will help me to remember it. ;-)

Here is the original color version:

Grown-up Cypress Knees

Thanks for the tip, Photoshop Guys.

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Four in a row

Four in a row.

Another image of Spring blooming in Kalmia Gardens. I hope your spring is colorful this year.

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Radiant

Japanese Maple

There was a gorgeous Japanese Maple tree at Kalmia Gardens. The leaves simply glowed from the backlighting. It almost has an Autumn feel, but the leaves of the tree are red rather than green. Have a good weekend.

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In the swamp

The Black Creek Swamp

Kalmia Gardens in Hartsville, South Carolina encompasses a portion of the swamp surrounding Black Creek. This hollowed out tree seemed like a good subject. It made me think of all of the the ghost stories and folklore we grow up with about swamps. In that vein, I processed this image to try to fit that mood.

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