Church – Conway

24. April 2012 · Comments Off on Church – Conway · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , ,

One of the fun (or dangerous) things about owning Photoshop, is that you can go a little mad!  You can definitely “over process” an image.  In fact many people (including Lisa) tell me I do that all the time, but I don’t care I like my images.  However tonight’s posting is a conscious choice to go over the top.

While driving back home from Mount Vernon I passed this really cool church.  I literally drove right past it, did a u-turn and went back for another look.  It’s all wood and I loved the steeple and the fancy windows.  So I decided to take a picture.  Unfortunately it  was positioned right by a main road and the road had power cables in the air that would have ruined the picture.  I tried lots of angles and found the one posted here the best.

When I got home to check out the picture there were a couple of issues.  Firstly there were loads of parking signs in the church car park (so I took them out with Photoshop), and secondly the sky looked REALLY boring.  It was almost white and gave the image a dull flat look.

I was playing with some filters and got this really cool purple sky and at that time Lisa was walking past.  Anyway she loved the sky and said I should post it like that (this is the person that says she doesn’t like it when my pictures are over processed and look fake).   I can honestly say the sky looked nothing like this, but, it would have been cool if it did.

Carter and Master Chief decided to read some technical books today but couldn’t agree on which one to start.

Barn – Conway

22. April 2012 · Comments Off on Barn – Conway · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , ,

One of the advantages of driving yourself to a location and not using a tour bus is that you can stop any time you want to take a picture.  This is exactly what happened yesterday on the way home from Mount Vernon.  I was driving towards Conway when I saw this barn.  It looked pretty old and not in great shape (which always makes a great picture) so I parked up and grabbed the gear.

The barn was quite far from the road and in front of the barn was a ton of dandelions.  The yellow flowers against the green grass were the thing that actually caught my eye.  To the left of the barn was a load of farm equipment (tractors, plows etc.,) which really looked terrible, so I figured out two options to composite the picture.

The image I’m posting tonight was the first one I tried.  Placing the barn just off center to the left let me get a load of the yellow dandelions with out the farm equipment.  The second attempt was of the farm directly in front of the camera.  The second image looked OK (in fact Lisa said it was her favorite), but it didn’t have many flowers and wasn’t, in my opinion, a good composition – this huge barn in the center of the screen was too obvious – too much “in your face” so I went with the first (my favorite).

The sky in the picture looks quite cool but didn’t look like that to the human eye.  I had a very thin layer of cloud above that looked almost white.  It was pretty boring but you never know what it will look like on the computer.  When I got home I added some contrast and dropped the color temperature of just the sky to make it look a little more dramatic.  This (I think) really helped the sky and made it a valuable part of the image rather than something that you want to distract the user from.

Cater and the dudes decided to chill out in the hottub today with a load of ducks!