Camellia - 'Crimson Robe'

Moonlight

At the Reservoir

Dcim\100media\Dji_0010.Jpg

Curacao Sea Aquarium

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Little Grayson dancing with his shadow.

Power lines cross the flat lands of East Texas. I don't know if these are running from plants around Houston to power the refineries on the coast, or if they're running from the coastal industrial blight to power the mass of Houston.

Here's a behind the scenes ramble about my creative process in photography. My camera is very old (by digital camera standards) and has been horribly abused (by me), and I'm pretty sure it's in the slow process of a lingering demise. It's got a couple of issues I've mentioned before. One, the autofocus is shot, especially on a cloudy day, and my vision's grown weak enough that I can't manually compensate. Two, I think the sensor's going, and the exposures get darker and darker as time goes on. It's okay in bright light, but on a cloudy day like this, its performance is pretty weak. Which, you know, is fair, because I've probably taken about a million pictures with the camera since 2013.

The challenge, then, is to see what I can tease out of a crappy picture in processing. Again, for bright pictures, I can mostly do what I need to do with my ancient version of Photoshop and still get decent shots, though sometimes I have to compensate for the focal issues with the unsharp mask tool, a cheat I don't care for aesthetically. But a picture like this is harder. So I've developed a two step process that involves running the picture through Photoshop and doing what I can there, then uploading it not to here, but to the account I still maintain at the French photo site where I took refuge for so long when I abandoned flickr in 2013.

Now, I don't display anything over there any more for a number of reasons, the biggest being that my subscription ran out about a year ago. I could have renewed it, but I had some pretty strong reservations about the change in management. On top of that, they said they were going to kill all the free accounts, meaning that people like Robin and a few other relatives who maintained accounts there solely to look at my pictures wouldn't be able to participate in the site any more, and half my purpose for being there would be erased. The funny thing is that my account has been free for a year now and they still haven't deleted me, and as it turns out, they actually have no idea how to delete the free accounts, so all the talk of deleting free accounts that drove me and at least a few other paying customers off turned out to be pointless. I find that funny.

So I maintain my free account there because the account gives me free access to a version of PicMonkey, and in my particular circumstance, I can fix things in PicMonkey I can't in Photoshop. It does a better job of brightening a picture without blowing out the lighter parts. So I run the picture through that. Because my account's free, though, I can't save the edited version, and I can't download it to my computer, but in what I can only imagine is an unnoticed loophole, I can upload the edited version directly to here. Which I also find funny. It's really kind of a redneck process of getting around things, and I always find that sort of thing entertaining. If they ever do delete my account over there in France, my process will be screwed. But then, I'm getting ready to buy a new camera anyway. I just have to work myself up to doing it. So I'm probably fine.

used PicMonkey's sample beach image, with the new mirror effect, and a bit of other editing. :)

Perin's second single - Motherboard!

Drooping her head shyly.

Using PicMonkey to create a 'reflection'.

First, open the photo.

Next, go to Frames and choose a Simple Edge frame. Set the outer and inner frames to the same colour and make them and the Caption Space the largest they can be. Apply that. If you want an even larger reflection area, you can repeat the frame with the same colour.

Next, go to Overlays, choose Your Own and open the photo. It will appear small, but right-click on it and choose "Original size". Then click the flip button to flip it upside down and set the fade to about 60% or so. Move the overlay down into reflection area until it looks right.

*I never knew their wings were so long!

I suppose that is what helps their aerial acrobatics when in the murmuration.

Happy. Fence Friday.

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Edited in PicMonkey, crop, Graphic Novel and film frame too.

From Stitchery Dickory Dock

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