A stark black and white shot taken at Lyme Park, in Cheshire, England. For some reason last year I got into black and white photography - something I have not done much of in over forty years of taking pics. I know that colour pics can easily be changed to black and white on photoshop, but sometimes I think that effect is better using the black and white mode on the digital camera. The difference between takling and colour and black and white as far as the photographer is concerned consists of learning to 'see' in black and white - which means picking out shapes and textures rather than areas of hue and colour.
Showing posts with label Trees. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Trees. Show all posts
Winter snow field and trees
Winter snow on a field and trees near Rode Heath, Cheshire, England. The only fall of snow that we have had this winter! An early morning walk saw a couple of photo opportunities before the sun rose too high and began to melt the snow.
Dune trees - Rotate image tutorial
Trees near the beach at Formby Point. This little group of trees stood a little in isolation from surrounding trees and they stood out to me. I like the contrast between the softness of the grass and the hardness of the trees, and the complimentary colours of the grass against the sky. if I was going to do anything else to this, I would increase the colour saturation to make that contrast of colour more effective using Photoshop in Image/Adjust/HueSaturation. What is important in this shot is that the trees are vertical. The slope of the grass bank tends to make us compensate when taking a picture like this so that the trees end up at an angle. If this happens, it can be corrected in Photoshop using Image/Adjust/Rotate canvas/Arbitary. A value can be added here of say 2 or 3 degrees and the image can be rotated clockwise or counterclockwise to get the trees vertical. The image then has to cropped using the crop tool to restore a full image without angled backgound tone.
Sunset trees, near Consall, Staffordshire. Camera choice
Sunset trees taken with my Samsung camera. People sometimes ask me what camera I use. Most of the images on this blog are taken on a digital camera. They were taken on a Samsung Digimax V4. This is a 4 million pixel camera which I bought a few years ago now. What I liked about it was that it had lots of manual override functions, so I could change expose, aperture or shutter speeds if I wished to. It also had a moderate optical zoom. I find digital zoom to be a waste of time. I have just upgraded my camera to a Ricoh Caplio R7. This is a very neat, small compact camera. Again, I liked its range of manual override features. It gives an 8 million pixel image, so this is twice the definition of my old camera. Also, it has a great optical zoom range, an equivalent 28mm-200mm zoom on a 35mm camera. I like the good wide angle since I mainly take landscape shote, but the good zoom range means that I can get up closer when I need to. It uses a lithium-ion battery which lasts quite a while and is neat and compact. My old Samsung used AA batteries but drained them very quickly. My new camera is proving very satisfactory, though I have to be careful on telephoto shots as the focus takes a few moments to adjust.
Sepia misty trees
This was an opportunistic shot taken one misty morning in July on my way to work at about 6:30 in the morning...I ran around like an idiot taking about ten photos before I had to dash off to work. Misty images like this lend themselves to a sepia effect. This was originally a colour digital image. I went into Photoshop, opened the file and went into Image/Mode and clicked on Greyscale. This turned it into a black and white image. I probably then went into Image/Auto Contrast to see if this improved the image. I then went back into Image/Mode and clicked on RGB. This turned it back into a colour image though in appearance it remained black and white. I then went into Image/Adjust/Colour Balance. You can get a number of sepia effects by moving the sliders. Try 0 -50 -79. Or try +31 -34 -79. This is just one way of producing a sepia effect in Photoshop, and a quick one. Once I was happy with the effect, I clicked on File/Save As and gave the file a new name and saved it as a JPEG. This means that I still had the original file to play with.
Avenue of trees
An avenue of trees in September on the Rode Hall Estate in South Cheshire. The road of course just leads the eye into the picture. Although in terms of left and right, the road cuts the picture in two by being in the centre, the focal point, the end of the road, is placed one third up from the bottom. This helps to give a sense of space and formality. Standing to the side so that the road came into the picture more from one side or the other did not look as effective...the formality of the composition was lost.
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