Clouds, Floods and Signs! Oh My!

Clouds are beautiful and unique and you can make them look like anything you want. While we were on our roadtrip to Mexico there were some pretty sweet clouds and I attempted to capture them in all their glory. Hope you enjoy these as much as I do!

I had quite a few more, but I didn’t want to bore anyone here.

When we were driving through a few of the midwestern states there was some major flooding going on and I tried to capture it but I’m not sure I was successful. Oh well, here they are:

I had never seen anything like this before, I only wish I could have gotten better pictures.

Finally, SIGNS. While we were driving we passed a place called Shelbyville, one of my good friends name is Shelby. From that point on I devoted myself to taking pictures of signs that had the names of my friends in them. My determination lasted about 2 days and then the excitement passed so I missed out on taking more than the ones I managed to get. I realized, though, that it is tricky trying to take pictures of signs while you’re driving past them at 70 mph. Anyways, here are the few that I got:

There are a few more but the internet here is a little slow so it takes a while for pictures to load, therefore I won’t be adding any more pictures to this post.

Signing off now,
-Katie

Random

Well, this week I didn’t really know what to do for my project so I did some random things.

These are some pictures I took a while ago, but I finally decided to put them on here. It was when I went camping over the summer and I was sitting around the fire with my friends, I was looking at the beautiful moon and I decided to try to take some pictures of it. 

I do like these a lot. I like how the branches cut into the moon. The later ones are my favorite, the ones where neither the moon nor the branches are in focus. It reminds me of something Twitchell showed us, a series done by Zach Arias, found here: http://www.zarias.com/imperfect-work-blowing-it-on-purpose/. The last 2 are my favorite, I really like the contrast of the bright moon and the branches, and I don’t know, I just really like them, nice and simple.

 

Then I did some editing, the first 2 are old photos that I thought could be enhanced, so I tried to emphasize the color. The other three were art projects that I had to take pictures of and I I just wanted to make them look their best in a photo.

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I really liked the original photo, but I thought that I could emphasize the beautiful sunset and clouds, so I tried to do my best. I like how it turned out, but I don’t like that I lost so much of the detail.

(after)

(before)

They sky is always so pretty, in my opinion. I took this picture as I was walking around one day a while ago. When I was editing my photos for my post last week I was messing around with 2 pictures of the sky and I figured out a way to make the sky look all pretty, just using curves and levels.

(after)

(before)

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For these 3 pictures, I was trying to get it to their original colors and shades, I guess. For the eye and the lips I just did some level adjustments. For the middle one I had to do some hue/saturation adjustment and levels.

 

Anyways, it was just good practice with basic editing once again.

Summer Time!

So, its been a while. This summer, I didn’t really take a lot of photos, and most of the ones I took I already put online, so I’m just going to put some random photos on.

I had the privilege of camping with some friends, and I experimented some fire photos once again.

I really like these photos, I like the movement in it, and the colors are always nice and warming just like the fire.

Ok, so anyways, more random photos from the summer. This photo was from a drive to the Tri-Citites. My mom got a little point and shoot for a trip she went on this summer. I was checking out the various settings on the camera and one I found was Film Grain. I actually like this picture a lot. The simplicity of it is “refreshing” (possibly, maybe). I like the effect of the film grain though, and I think its cool that the camera offers it as a setting.

On the same drive to Tri-Cities, I was looking through the mirror and noticed the reflection of the hills on the side of the car through the side mirror. I took a really cool picture that I was in love with (not really, but I did like it a lot) and sadly it got deleted, so I tried taking another one. This one isn’t as good as the other one. In the original, I could see the lines painted on the road, and they were in focus and the colors reflected on the car were a yellow/orange and blue. It was really pretty. So sad its gone 😦

These two pictures were taken on the prairie as my mom and I were driving to Spokane. I thought the clouds coming down the mountains were really cool, to me it looked like a wall of snow was coming down the mountain or something.

I must say, I’m really glad my mom has her point and shoot with her pretty much all the time hahaha.

So thats what I’ve been up to this summer, along with the 2 previous posts.

Phone and Photoshop

So the lovely Mr. Twitchell kept encouraging us to some photos with our camera phones. I didn’t really know what to take pictures of…so what was I to do? Well last week and this week, we were blessed with rain and clouds, nothing too exciting, at least not a first thought. During these past 2 weeks though, there were some beautiful moments where the sun would come out and shine down upon us. I love the moments where the sun is out and shining, and behind a tree is the dark ominous rain clouds, and this week, there were some of these moments, so I pulled my phone out and grabbed a shot.

Here is what I got:

I like this photo above because of the brightness of the tree. I only wish the background was a little darker so it would stand out more. I really don’t like all of the extra “stuff” in the photo, such as the house and cars etc. but what can one expect when taking pictures out her window 🙂 hahaha.

I like the lines of the clouds, to me it seems as if they are leading to the tall tree off to the right side. I don’t like the faintness of the trees, I think it would be better if they were a little darker, and some of them are blurry, so if I was to adjust the levels to a higher darkness, it would look a little funky.

The picture above is probably my favorite out of this set. The composition of it is very nice, having the tree off the the far right and having the barn off to the far left, it creates a balance in the photo, but the line of the fence brings the eye to the tree. I really like the colors in it, the bright green grass is a good spring photo, and the hint of red on the barn adds just enough without taking away from the rest of the picture.

In the picture above, I like the dark blue color on top, the bright blue in the middle, and the dark black on the bottom. The bright blue breaks up the darker sections providing a nice, natural contrast.

I wouldn’t say these are anywhere near professional, not even something necessarily beautiful, but I think they are pretty decent for a phone, and I’m fairly happy with the results I got. There are things I wish I could control a little bit better, such as camera shake or contrast, but they’re not big problems.

Another thing I’ve been working on this week is more photoshop tutorials. I got all of these tutorials from http://www.photoshopstar.com/.

This is what I did:

Not too bad once again considering I am not a photoshop pro. They aren’t exactly like the tutorial showed, but that’s okay, I’m happy with them :). I’m hoping that doing all of these tutorials will get me more familiar with photoshop and improve my skills.

My Favorites!!! :)

This week was experimental with things that I find fascinating. I was very pleased with my results.

I have this strange obsession with taking photos of clouds. They are so graceful and simple, yet so intriguing. These are photos of some lovely clouds that I took a few weeks ago. It may look like I did a lot of photoshopping, but surprisingly I did not. The only thing I really did was fix the balance and contrast and crop a little bit, the blue was the natural color. I got my inspiration by looking out my window. For my settings, I tried different ones until I got ones that worked.

I also tried taking fire photos using our wood fire place. It was difficult to get the flames, but eventually I did succeed. I noticed when I was attempting them, it required a fast shutter speed, but the problem with that is you need more light. When I used the flash, it lit up the entire fire place when I simply wanted the flames, so it definitely was a learning process, but I was happy with what I got. I did minimal photoshopping as far as cropping, some sharpening, and brightness and contrast.

My favorite for this week is WATER! I got the idea from Carson Green. I asked him what he did to get his AWESOME photos and he said he had a fast shutter speed and used his flash, and that was pretty much it. I went home and used my bathroom sink. I set my shutter speed to 1/2000 and used my flash, the only other light I had was the one above the sink, and then I taped a piece of black construction paper to the sink so the water would be easier to see. This is what I got from it and I’m very pleased with my results. As far as photoshopping, I did it 2 different ways, I either burned the background to make it completely black, or I used the contrast mask, and then adjusted the levels.