Happy Accidents

By Amy, on May 25th, 2011%

I went shooting in Downtown Minneapolis today, even though the sky was crap. Evenly overcast, so the sky was a bright grey that messes with your exposures, without offering anything of interest to the overall scene. I hate shooting on days like this–I end up with very few keepers, even though I now know how to play with the exposure compensation.

This was the time I had to go downtown to shoot, though, and I’ve never been completely skunked. No matter how bad I think the conditions are, or how disappointed I am with the overall shoot, it seems like there is always one intriguing image in the bunch that’s worth playing with. So it was today–a couple of shots I really liked, and a whole bunch more I should really delete. Before deleting, though, I decided to play with Photoshop Elements Photomerge to see if I could salvage those icky skies.

Well, no, not really. They were that bad. So rather than aiming for realism, I decided to see what I could do if I was willing to enter the land of the fantastic. On my way there, I took a left turn, and combined the wrong images. Here is the result:

I hope I remember how I did this. This effect is worth playing with some more.

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Bluebird of Happiness

By Amy, on April 22nd, 2011%

Sometimes . . . well, ok, a lot of times, I go for shots I don’t really have a prayer of getting. So it was when a Bluebird perched on a tall stalk of something close enough that I was tantalized, but not so close as to get an awesome image. Bluebirds are skittish little creatures.

I fired off a bunch of shots anyway. Why not–sometimes things turn out better than you imagine. In this case, they didn’t. The bird wasn’t quite in focus. Or maybe it’s more that it was so small that by the time I cropped in, there simply wasn’t good enough resolution for the picture to be worth anything. But it was an adorable Bluebird, so what to do? Play with Photoshop filters and make it look more like an impressionistic painting:

And of course, I wasn’t happy with just one version, so I kept playing:

And playing:

And then I went a little nuts with the filters. I’m still not sure if I like this one or not:

Of course, sometimes that photo you’re reaching for turns out well enough to live with. That’s what happened with this White Pelican from the same day. Not the best shot in the world, and I cropped heavily. However, I’d never gotten a picture of a White Pelican before, and they fascinate me. So this is a good start, and now I have a goal of getting better shots the next time:

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