pictures in order - above - Gold Creek Pond. Below, my garden, Gold Creek twice and Skagit County Mt. Baker.
As always I am interested in scale as it is shown in overall color and texture. the middle two are cell phone pics the other three taken with a Nikon D800 - which I am still trying to figure out how to use all the buttons on. sheesh.  I have again run them through Aurora and Photoshop to enhance the color.

I am amazed with what kind of pictures one can get from a cell phone. Even more amazing is what you can do with them in some photo editing programs. I recently got Aurora - which is an HDR program - and found that although I can take HDR pictures with my DSLR - taking 5 different photos of the same thing at different F-stops and the program will condense them - It will also take any image and pump it up.

​You get a number of choices and then you can tweak it - and then - load it into photoshop and do more magic with it. 

Zowie. What a wonderful modern world we live in.  Not to mention that where I live is nothing short of spectacular and amazing to look at and photograph. And there is so much color this time of year.

​did I mention I retired? :) … and I love color?

I suppose I need to get unlazy and use the DSLR...

Visited Goleta California... so nice to see the sun set. The coast runs east west in that area so the arc of the sun  is parallel to the beach. I will try and do some paintings of the ocean beach. did a few water color sketches when I was there.

the birds do not like the bees... they fly around to avoid them. Suppose getting stung would not be a good thing for a tiny bird. Often there is  pretty complex dance around the feeder.

In this case, having a big sensor is helpful -- I was able to get some of the images almost in focus despite having a little tremor. I tried a tripod but couldn't really see to frame a shot or fine adjust the auto focus.
Shooting against a white wall and brightly lit yard on a sunny day made some of the captured images under or over exposed. Fixed in raw.  Am getting better at photoshop.
I have quite a few feeders out this time of year and they go through about a quart a day!

I like how in this image you can see details - the individual feathers on the bird, the tip of her tongue - but the wings are ghosts in motion. You can see the wind from the wings  pick up the feathers on her back near the base of the wing. I love the little white spot by the eyes. Always the illusion that the eyes are almost human with the white part making the almond shape. Makes her look like she's got big eyes like a doll.

eventually I'll get two entire birds in the same frame and in focus, but so far this is as close as I've gotten. They do all sorts of things with their tails - I am guessing they flare them to give a message as well as use it to adjust air speed. Basically I sat on the deck for an hour waiting for them to fly in and out. They were certainly more cautious with me there, but it did not stop them. I was waiting for a rust toned boy with the orange flashing neck and head feathers, but no such luck the other day.  I will have to try again. One nice thing about digital cameras -- lots of images you can not use.

Went to Eastern Washington on Wednesday. I am very interested in the textures and patterns of the open landscape there. Layers of patterns from the tiny to the monumental - the idea of shifting focus. The motifs  all move over different periods of time, with erosion, seasonal growth as well as the instantaneous movement of the wind or flight.

there are things that intrigue me about the image of the trout lilies mixed in the grass. Like some of my paintings earlier this year the image speaks of how we see and search for what we want to be the motif even in a wealth of compelling detail - detail that we want to make into background but which is not quiet. the grasses represent a struggle both in this years growth and in lasting gestures of the older blades which seem to reach out.
​the gallery below the struggle of new growth  of lupines at high altitude, wild sun flowers in the wind by ancient sage and a dragon fly on a tiny cat tail.

In this photo of an eroding basalt cliff I used about 8 layers in photos shop to show the different areas all in their best light using different adjustments and levels. I used the magic lasso to separate out even the corners and boost the color a little more there to bring them forward  just a little more -  much in the same way I would in a painting. the cliff is on the western edge of the Columbia river basalt that  flowed in layers from  6 to 17 million years ago and shaped the region.

I felt I had to show this one out of the gallery because it looks so small in the gallery format. I am using weebly, which is easy, but not perfect as a web design tool. But then, how to get a tall rectangle on to a wide rectangle format...

I took these photos with the Nikon d800 and an 18-200 lens. Most of the images are wide, but for some of them I used the longer focal length to zoom in. A nice thing about raw files, it lets you know what you did to get the image.  See the far right top and it lists the setting. In editing in raw, usually l set the white balance and dink with the other basic controls. The data is all there in a raw file, and it's up to you as to how you are going to interpret it. Pretty amazing. ​For a lot of the beach-scapes shot at a short focal length, I corrected for the lens issue and de-curved the horizon line - a nice feature of raw. Another great feature to get rid of any fish eye look. See picture below right. Probably could be useful when photographing large paintings to square them up. ​Next it's into regular Photoshop - here I used a number of layers so that the levels, saturation, and more could be different in different areas. A few have as many as 8 layers, so we can see the data the camera's sensor recorded in the sky, water, beach and other areas, each in their 'best light'. As I was editing I found I was able to manipulate the foreground, middle-ground, background and more like I would in a painting. :) Adding drama and emphasis in different areas.  ​In the gallery you can see the 'as shot' untouched jpg of one of the images. ​Click the images to enlarge and start the gallery view.

see previous posts on photography on my drawing and painting blog here
​
https://www.annheideman.com/2d-blog/learning-to-take-accurate-pictures-of-my-paintings-for-the-internet

https://www.annheideman.com/2d-blog/white-balance-in-raw-files-raw-files-are-your-friends