Red - Let's Do 52 - Week 5

Red Apples

Red and Black Medallion
made with Kaliedecam App aimed at one of my quilts.

Once again, I am participating in Denise Love's 2018 "Let's Do 52 : 52 Weeks of Photo Prompts" to kick start the lull in my photography.   If you'd like to join us, find out more at the link above.  The more the merrier!

Something from Every Day : Week 1 2 Lil Owls Photo Prompts

I thought I would use Denise Love's 2017 "Let's Do 52 : 52 Weeks of Photo Prompts" to kick start the lull in my photography.   If you'd like to join us, find out more at the link above.  The more the merrier!

There are a number of reasons I've let that interest wain -- some of it involves :
     1) not liking my current camera as much as my old one, even though it's the same company (Canon)
     2) the demise of Picassa as a photo management system and catalog
     3) my abject fear of losing pictures in LightRoom (despite a 60-hour class designed to show me all the ins and outs.) 
     4) frustrations with PSE14.

Time to bite the bullet and get back to it, and master some of these challenges!

Here's the original still life I started with : 

a simple bowl of apples with some nice light.

The photo at the top of this post uses the Topaz Impression filter for Georgia O'Keefe.  

One of my favorite treatments!

2BD17 : Eyes-on-the-Prize Do-Over

For this week's lesson, Kim asked us to critique our own work.  Work worked well?  What could be better?  Consider what we'd have done different and give ourselves a chance at a do-over.  I took the Maggie-apple pic from the last post.  After sleeping on it, I thought I could improve it ...

As a reminder, here it is from The Apple Sessions.  I decided the green was just too overpowering, so I used The Coffee Shop Blog's Selective Color Action to black-and-white-ify the image, and used a layer mask to brush back in selective color on the apple and Maggie's face.  True, she is a black dog, but returning the color to her eye and tongue really helped bring it back to life.  Not to mention the many shades of black in her beautiful coat!    I also cropped it down to be more square.

Yes!  I'm much happier with this do-over.  I think this one is worth framing and printing!  Thanks to Kim for suggesting the do-over and giving us the chance to revisit one of our pics.

 Here's the Evil Queen Do-Over.  Again, I used the Selective Color Action (as above) to tone down the too-green background.  But she came out looking more like a cartoon character (Well--I know she is Disney, but that's not quite the effect I was going for here.)  I added a few textures, and a gradient to brighten her face and tone down the purple in her gown.    Yes--another tweaking success!

This is where I left it the other day.  I'm liking the new one better!

2B D16 : An Apple a Day

Green Apple with Pitcher

The lesson this week was to take lots of apple pictures.  Practice makes perfect. She also encouraged us to step outside of our comfort zones and push our limits.

I did play with a version of this in PSE, but decided I liked the original SOOC best.

 

Red Apple with Pitcher

 

I must have taken 200 shots of this kind of macro on 4 different cameras with various settings and lenses in the past month.  Talk about practice!  Talk about pushing my limits (3 lenses to swap out).  I learned a lot, and deleted most of those shots.  

These are a few of the better ones.

Green Apple at Home

I really like this one - soft and golden.

The only tweaking for this one was to make it black-and-white.

Which one do you like better?

Eyes on the Prize

Maggie, my 2nd-hand Newfie loves apples.  Normally, she's very shy when I take out the camera, but she'll do just about anything for an apple.

                            The Evil Queen with Poisoned Apple

We went to the Door County Renaissance Faire this past weekend.  It's a relatively new and well-done Ren Faire that is growing.  Most of it happens in the woods, except for the jousting and Equestrian Arts which is in a field.  The Evil Queen was at the Wishing Well selling bottled water.  She took money, but also accepted apples.  ;-)  I could not pass up the chance to get her portrait with said apple.  What fun!
Here's the processing step-by-step :
1) Background image
2) Copy background image - Screen blend mode - 20%
3) RadLab : Contrast (Luma) - Sugar Rush - POS Lens - EZ Burn (Original) - Prettyizer
4) Kim Klassen's 1402 Magic Texture - Screen Blend Mode 47%
5) Kim Klassen's Printed Texture - Soft Light - 22%
6) Color FIll Frame (Black) - Color Blend Mode