Day 263 of 365

Day 263 of 365, originally uploaded by Rob Weiher.

We have pampas grass growing in various places on this old military base so stopped and cut a couple stalks down today on my way home from running some errands. I fully intended on doing my usual Sunday walk and take some outdoor shots but I found that my camera battery was almost dead when I got to my usual walking spot. Oops...

This shot is lit from the side. Shooting with the tungsten white balance produced boring colors I used the sun setting instead. My camera settings were 1/30 sec, f/4.5, ISO 100.

Day 262 of 365

Day 262 of 365, originally uploaded by Rob Weiher.

I was going to use this grape leaf between two sheets of glass like I've been doing the past couple of days but the leaf doesn't like to lay flat. I was determined to figure out a way to back light the leaf and came up with the following. Grabbed two items with flat tops of equal height, set them apart about a foot and draped them in black fabric. Places a sheet of glass on top of the makeshift stand. Put a small office lamp, the kind with the flexible neck, underneath and pointed the light up. The light was about a foot below the glass . After taking some shots of just the top of the leaf I noticed the reflection and wondered how it would look. I think it looks spiffy.

I've been really bad about posting my camera settings but for today they were 1/50 sec, f/8.0, ISO 100 and to bring out the colors more I used the sunlight white balance setting.

Day 261 of 365

Day 261 of 365, originally uploaded by Rob Weiher.

Same setup as yesterday but with eucalyptus leaves. To bring out the colors I used the sunlight white balance setting instead of the tungsten white balance setting which would be correct for the lighting used. As with yesterday I don't have the ideal setup as there are scratches and lint on the glass used to sandwich the leaves but these would be easy to remove in post.

Day 260 of 365

Day 260 of 365, originally uploaded by Rob Weiher.

Not sure what kind of dried leaf this is...maybe some kind of birch? We have various dried leaves around the house and I've been wanting to figure out a way to photograph them with light coming from behind. Today I brainstormed the idea of putting the leaf between two pieces of glass, in this case a piece of glass and a piece of plexiglas, and light from an angle so it's not straight on light. The two pieces of glass weren't the best, scratched up and couldn't get entirely dust free. I put the leaf between the two pieces and taped it together and then stood them straight up so I could shoot straight into the leaf. The light was above and slightly behind about 3 feet up from the leaf. The background was about 2 or so feet behind the setup. Other than the scratches and dust that you can see in the photo I think it came close to how I wanted it to look. I'll continue to play with this but want to get two regular pieces of glass, maybe about 8x10 and wear clean cotton gloves when handling as to not scratch and smudge the glass.

Below is a cleaned up version. I removed the dust specks and scratches that I could find on the glass. Did a slight levels adjustment and a high pass sharpen to bring out the wrinkles and serrated edge more.

Day 259 of 365

Day 259 of 365.jpg, originally uploaded by Rob Weiher.

From left to right: black beans, split peas, lentils and mung beans. Spent more time sorting out the beans after I was done than it did taking the photos. :)

Day 258 of 365

Day 258 of 365, originally uploaded by Rob Weiher.

Playing with lighting and texture again this evening. Was having some difficulty getting it to look how I was wanting it to so I've again done a little post work much like yesterdays. One thing that just dawned on me was I didn't see how the flower would look with a different white balance setting. I bet if I had changed it from fluorescent light to sunlight the red would have been more vibrant. I did this with the sweet potatoes the other day.

While I strive to try and do everything in camera sometimes I enjoy seeing what I can do with an image in Photoshop. I think this may be only the third or fourth time I've included an edited version of my photo of the day. If you're interested in seeing me do more examples of how I would do post on certain images that may need it please let me know.

Here's my edited version of todays photo.

Day 257 of 365

Day 257 of 365, originally uploaded by Rob Weiher.

Was looking around for something to work with this evening and found some chard in the refrigerator. The stem and veins got me to thinking about shooting it like I did the sweet potatoes yesterday.

Using my 70-300mm macro lens, which I used yesterday as well, I put the black fabric on the floor and my tripod fully extended above it. Thankfully the tripod extends out to almost 7 feet so I had to stand on a chair to look through the viewfinder. I took several shots at different shutter speeds and aperture to try and get the best highlight and shadow details. This my shot of the day is the best shot but I wanted to see if I could make it more like I was envisioning.

This next shot is a composition of two shots.

My photo of the day is the base and another much darker version seen below was layered over to help bring in some detail.

Using Photoshop I had my photo of the day as the background image. I pulled the darker image over so it was layer 1. I used the overlay blend mode with layer 1 and then did two separate level adjustments. The first (3rd layer) was to lighten a little and the second (4th layer) was to darken. I did it this way because I used a mask on the 4th layer. With the mask I inverted it (ctrl+backspace) and painted back in some of the dark at a low opacity. Below is a screenshot of my layers panel.

Day 256 of 365

Day 256 of 365.jpg, originally uploaded by Rob Weiher.

I bought a copy of a magazine that caught my attention the other day. It was a special edition of the magazine, Color. The entire edition was nothing but photos that people had submitted for a portfolio contest. I really liked it for the diversity of different styles.

One particular photographer, Bob Francis, really caught my eye because he was doing stuff that I had attempted early on but went away from. Time to play with the style again. So...tonight I give you sweet potatoes against black background with lighting for texture and shadow.

Day 255 of 365

Day 255 of 365, originally uploaded by Rob Weiher.

Went out for a walk this morning and took a variety of shots that range from pelicans, boats, bocce ball, people and plants. Looking through them all this particular shot of a young fern was the one that made me pause. I do have some of other shots from the day that I liked and those will be posted on my Flickr if you're interested.

I find that I keep going to the same place for my photo walks. Because of this laziness, lazy in the sense that I'm sure there are other places to walk around but this place is the most convenient, I've made it a point to look differently at my surroundings each time. Today was kind of a smorgasbord of shots but the next time I think I'll focus solely on textures.

Day 254 of 365

Day 254 of 365.jpg, originally uploaded by Rob Weiher.

I believe this will be my last attempt at trying to find new and interesting way of using blacklight. I'm tapped...

A tip if you decide too try and use blacklighting in the future. See those spots all over the photo. Those are pieces of lint on the piece of black velvet fabric I used as my backdrop. Can't see them in regular light but they sure do show under black light. I decided too just incorporate into the shot, which isn't much but like I said...I'm tapped.