Merry Christmas to all my friends

A very merry Christmas to everyone.

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Sunday Stills, the next Challenge: Holiday Lights and Decorations

Good morning from a windy Hastings morning.

This is  a new challenge for me –Sunday Stills, the next Challenge: Holiday Lights and Decorations.  I just loved the photos this week by Cee’s Photography with her Christmas lights.  As it is summer here for Christmas we just don’t have the same ambience with the Christmas lights.  We do have families who dress up their homes for Christmas but we have to wait until very late at night to really see them.  So I thought of taking photos of window decorations while out walking.  I only found a few.  When I was still at school I used to paint our windows with a big Santa and trees etc. I prefer the camera these days.

They have all been edited with FX Photostudio Pro.

Then I added them to a card in the Greeting Card Shop app.

I edited the photo with Santa into a vintage sepia tone so that it went with the colours of this second card.

So a Merry Christmas to everyone out there.

Off Line for a while

Just a short note for those who follow my photos and challenges.  I will be offline for the next few days while I go and look after my parents.  So take care everyone.

Ese’s Weekly Shoot and Quote Challenge – Spread

Until you spread your wings, you’ll have no idea how far you can fly.

Unknown.

This weeks challenge for  Ese’s Weekly Shoot & Quote Challenge – Spread .     As I have been having problems with my photos I  have decided to use these iScrapbooking pages for my quote.  I love butterflies but they are notoriously hard to take.  The good photos I do have I have scrapbooked them for my Words of Inspiration blog.  I also love  this quote.  We have so many talents and gifts but many of us are too scared to use them, so it is time to spread our wings and see how far we can go.

Close to Home

 

Good morning from a cool but sunny Hastings.  Hopefully the stormy weather is over and warmer weather comes back.

Yesterday was a strange day with showers on and off all day.  It was odd hanging out my washing with drops of rain falling.  I got it dry though.  So I didn’t get to go for a walk but I got out around the garden for a few photos.  This one is my favourite.

 

Just as I turned around I noticed this sparrow on the clothes line so only just managed to get this photo before it flew off.

 

I love the way the trellis frames these flowers – daisy or margaritas – someone please tell me if I am wrong.

 

These are just about past their best now but I loved the way they were so close together.

 

 

The grapes are starting to grow.  I have taken lots of photos just of the leaves as there is so much texture in them.

 

 

These astroemerias are just lovely.  I had to google for the spelling of these.  I thought at the beginning that these were lilies but now know that they are not.  No I am not going to spell it again.  They are really coming into their own.

 

This is what I did last night with these flowers for my Words of Inspiration blog.  These flowers represent friendship, commitment and care for one another so I chose a quote from Socrates which I felt went with the meaning.  The font is Herculanum – an ancient latin font perfect for Socrates.

So you don’t have to go far for some good photos.

Cheers and have a nice day.

Raewyn

Roses, roses, roses

 

Good morning from a windy Hastings day.  Well actually at the moment it is calm, but the night was rather wild.

I have had this idea in the back of my head about using the same rose, but at different stages.  This is my attempt at it last night.  I have been taking photos of this rose around the same time each day, but over a week.  It was a beautiful old fashioned rose that was lovely full blown.  I wanted to have the affect of zooming out from the bud to a full blown stage.

This is the background image.  I edited it with Photoshop filters and changed the opacity .

 

This is the rose right at the back.  I started off by editing it with different filters, but couldn’t get rid of the background so ended up changing it to a PNG image and using the magic wand tool, got rid of the background but still kept some of the effects of the filters as I wanted it to distance itself from the bud in the front.  I also changed the opacity to around 85%.

 

This is the second rose.  I didn’t edit this or the other ones in front of it as they were still in their prime so to speak.  I did change the opacity to around 90%.

 

The third rose.  The opacity was around 95%.  I didn’t want too much of a difference between the different PNG images.

 

Finally this is the top rose at full opacity.

It was just a matter of resizing the images to get the affect I wanted.  I am not 100% sure that I achieved what I wanted or what I had in mind.  I will try it again at a later stage but with something different.

Cheers and have a nice day.

Raewyn

 

Split toning with Sonel’s Corner and Unique So Chic

 

Good morning from a windy Hastings day.

I love photo manipulation.  I have done photography for about 30 or so years.  While I lived in Austria I joined a camera club and got into it seriously.  Especially in the dark room.  I loved seeing images come alive and it was like going into a Tardis,  time didn’t matter.  Anyway I experimented with manipulating images with different papers and techniques.  This photo above is a self portrait.  I had loads of filters for my camera and the original of this was actually a photo of me at my sister’s wedding where I was her bridesmaid.  I just liked the way that I looked up just as the photo was taken.  So I used a macro filter on the lens to magnify it to make a larger portrait size.  It didn’t matter that it wasn’t sharp as I was going for a very soft look anyway.  The trouble with the dark room days is the time and paper used to get the right feel.  I used quite of bit of paper just to get the right feel.  Then it was sepia toned.  For the colour I used special photo paints to highlight the red.  As you can tell it was very longwinded and lots of wastage.  I entered this into a competition for the German magazine Fotomagazine and I came in 19th.  The brief was Nostalgia.  I based this on some old photos that my parents had taken of them just  after they got married where the photos were black and white but had been painted to give a coloured feel.  Actually the painting was really obvious, especially around the mouthes and eyes.

Fast forward to 2013 and digital photography and computer programmes.  What a difference.  What used to take days and lots of paper is now just a click and the images change before your eyes.  It is another click to get rid of the affects if you don’t like them.  Anyway I have just read  Amanda ♥ Unique So Chic‘s blog on split toning so I thought I would give it a go.  She has entered this photo challenge  at Sonel’s Corner.

I started by googling split toning and trying to follow instructions but I couldn’t manage to use the layers for some unknown reason so then I just used the colour enhancement tools from the top.  This way I was able to alter the highlights, shadows or mid tones without having to go through the individual layers.

 

This is the first photo I tried to manipulate.

Don’t ask me what I did.  I just went by the look.

By accident I discovered that I could create a shadow affect of movement.

This is a native fern of New Zealand and I was interested in the highlights.

Which you can see here, I tried to make the fern really stand out from the background.

 Again I just went by the look but wanted to keep the colours more neutral.

My third attempt.

I went for two totally different looks.  The first photo really emphasises the raindrops while the second one they fade away a bit.

 

My last attempt before I gave up for the night.

 

Obviously I focused more on a natural tone for the first one, while I pumped up the green for the second.

By this stage I was ready for bed.  It was fun though, I also discovered a lot more filters as well which gave some interesting affects such as this one.

 

This one I think took the longest to get the affect I wanted.  Which was to really show off the lilac petals but fade out the background a lot more.  I love the fact that with one photo you can create so many different affects and actually completely different images.  Without all the chemicals and papers.  Soooo much fun.

Cheers and have a nice day.

 

 

 

Up with the sun this morning

 

A colourful good morning from a windy Hastings today.

This morning I managed to catch the sunrise for the first time in months.  I normally miss it as I never wake up in time.  It had been windy overnight, and there is another bad weather front coming over the North Island so I woke up with the weather.  As I was opening my blinds I noticed some colour in the sky so just grabbed the camera and took off outside and I wasn’t disappointed.

I love watching the sun rise.  In the winter, although it is cold it is also later so that I don’t have to wake up at an unreasonable hour.  There is something special about watching a new day dawning and the colours that it brings.  My favourite photos are from last winter down at the duck pond at Cornwall Park.  Especially when it is icy and the mists rising from the water make for some really great photos.

 

What is great about shooting sunrises is that even though the photos might be just seconds apart they are never the same.

Just moving slightly changes the perspective and focal point of the colours as well.  These photos are shot towards the opposite direction of the sun rising.  This is what caught my eye when I got up.

Going from portrait to landscape mode also changes it.

 

I use the zoom a lot for sunrises as I love the way it really brings out the colours and also with these photos it plays around with the depth of field a bit.

 

All in all it was an awesome sunrise.

 

By this time it was starting to fade.

Cheers and have a nice day.

Raewyn

 

 

Learning wisdom

 

Good morning from a rather chilly, but sunny Hastings day.  Just when you think the weather is getting warm we get hit by these spring storms.  At least it isn’t snowing here like down in the South Island.

By going out with my camera I am really starting to take notice of and learning about flowers.  I am not a gardener, I am actually allergic to a lot  of weeds and am prone to infections should I even go near a garden.  But I do appreciate the lovely gardens around me.  I must apologise for getting ranunculus mixed up with  peonies.  Now I must google the flowers to check that I actually  have the right name to the flower.  I do know that this image is of lilacs as I bumped into a horticulturalist who showed my what to look out for.  When I do my quotes I try to keep to the meaning of the flowers.  For example lilacs are both whimsical and childlike according to the website flower choice.com.  It is full of a gentle, sophisticated promise of wisdom, celebrating a growth of innocence into experience – from childhood into adulthood.  so I chose this quote from Confucious about the experience of gaining wisdom.

I cropped this image of some sunlit lilacs that I had taken.

 

Then I made these three embellishments out of other photos from other lilac trees I have seen.

To give a more three dimensional look I changed the opacity of two of the embellishments, one at 70% and the other at 85%, while the third one was at 100%.  It was just a matter of resizing and arranging to suit the image I had in my mind.

The text is Dumbledore 1 – chosen for it’s wise quality – I love Harry Potter.

 

Cheers and have a nice day.

Raewyn

 

 

Celebrating the All Blacks

Good morning from a slightly grey Hastings day.

I make and sell these cute baby outfits on TradeMe, New Zealand’s equivalent to EBay.   I have just tweaked my design a bit so needed to update my image as well.  To start with the white logo on the outfits is my own design,  I used this unofficial flag as my inspiration.

 

I then transferred that to a graph and simplified New Zealand to NZ.  I knit them on a knitting machine for speed and a nicer look, and also for the intarsia technique for the design.  After a couple of years I am getting rather good at it.  Anyway I did the bands a different way as I decided to change them to make them a bit quicker to knit, as well as less wool.  I have spent the last couple of weeks making some new outfits.  The booties also have black sprigs on them to look like real rugby boots.

So what better way to celebrate the All Blacks winning the Rugby Championship in style than redesigning my photo.

I love this image of the silver fern.

 

And have used it many times.  It really just shows up the silver fern image.  This was my background which I also edited with Photoshop.

 

I use a lifelike doll to make the outfits look more interesting.  My husband can’t stand the doll as it looks far to realistic for him.  I love it.  Anyway using the layers I added them onto the silver fern image.  Just to be more patriotic I googled flags and added a New Zealand flag to it as well.

I chose this one as it was a little more realistic than just the flat image.

With Trademe the first image is free and then I have to pay for any further image so that by doing it all on one image I can show everything I want, plus say what the outfit entails – i.e. beanie, booties and jumper.

It is also on my website an my Facebook page for sale as well.

http://decocrafts.org/index.php/en/online-store#!/~/product/category=5592665&id=28529463

So check it out.

Cheers and have a nice day.

Raewyn