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I still see it as July 13 at the top of the page. Do you see it as July 14th? I guess I better think of something to photograph! And you have to post the puppy mosh pit again. It would be impossible to get too much of a puppy mosh pit.
well, for example, in the U.K. & Eire it's--what?--3:53 a.m. 14 July? and is Greece 5:53 or 6:53? i'd stay up later to post this but i need to snooze soon.
I was wondering how the date post worked - I guess when we pick the time zone on our profile it changes...I have to play with it. And here is a quickie from me but I will add more when I wake up.
Right, I hope my remark didn't come off as US-centric - what I meant was that for me it still says July 13 as the blog heading. So what we can do is keep posting here and then at some point when the blog heading says July 14 we can link back to this thread so that everyone gets reminded. No biggie.
However, since I am undeniably a Flickr whore and new to this newfangled Flickr grabassery - as well as being an indecisive wang-wrangler - the link on my pic goes to a set of 12 shots for things that grow.
one - two - three - four are the shots I did today that were in consideration for entry, the rest are from various dates and locations.
Here's a partial shot of a friendly, happy plant in my house that grows like mad. From the bottom of the pot, to the top of the plant, it stands about 3' tall - and the plant place guy where we bought it as a teeny-weeny not too long ago called it a "slow-grower". Hah!
And I need to figure out some way to mount a decent glass plate or filter on my crappy point-n-shoot digitals, but it'd probably have to be offset away from the lens on all my digitals quite a bit to be effective.
Also, is that digital? If not, what film? Details, woman, I must have obsessive details! :)
Hee! I'm using a (fairly) inexpensive Sony Cybershot with a Zeiss lens, but I'm a PShop girl, so sometimes I indulge myself in lilygilding. I do get some pretty amazing shots straight from the little box - but these I dabbled with. The colors are pretty much totally true, though.
So is it actually a vasoline filter? Or maybe a little blur of one or more flavors or an unsharp mask? It looks like film! (And I haven't said that about a digital since my brother first got a D70 and he was showing me open shutter + penlight graffiti stuff.)
I just blur and paste an unblurred version on top, then erase from the unblurred layer and/or do different blurring and use the history brush at various opacities to restore parts of the images back. On the top one, I also included the border in part of the blurring which helps give it that "film-y" impression. (In that one, also, I desaturated the background.)
One trick I like to use to give a great film-ish feel is to take a color shot, oversaturate it a bit, then desaturate the original image to grey tones, up the contrast quite a bit, erase all the white and highlights, so that it's just blacks, greys and transparent, then put this layer over the slightly over-saturated color image, and perhaps reduce the opacity of the grey-tone layer if needed.
taz: Sweet. I really haven't had a chance to play with the history tools all that much, but I've done similar via layers, masks and alpha channels.
So to be clear, it's not actually a real-world, physical vaseline gel/filter in front of the lens, then? That's the bit that's confusing me at this point.
Not at all meaning to deprecate your artful, evenhanded and deft touch in photoshop, but all kinds of insanity is possible there.
*sighs wistfully and thinks fondly of learning to dodge, burn, defocus, blur, skew stretch and retouch (badly, mostly) in the darkroom. but only in b/w. doing color by hand was totally impossible mad science back then*
No real world filter, loq - all playing in PS. In fact, here's how it basically went for the first shot (scrounging what I could from files still sitting on my PS desktop):
Boring photo (that I had plans for cropping) > crop and color-correct > desaturate background and add border > blur! > bring back some areas into focus for the shot I posted up above.
Where I work (a museum), there's a huge garden & landscape program - a 'living collection'. One element of it is a Victorian hothouse full of exotics. It's heavenly in wintertime, when you can walk in from a foot of January snow and be transported, but it's exploding with color and insane tropical overabundance and fragrance right now.
I went into the hothouse Wednesday to work with my co-worker John, who's the curator of landscape here. He was saying something to me, but I barely heard him; I had stopped and gotten lost in this.
A confetti-shower, an explosion of vibrant fuschia-purple, six-petalled orchids, wide open and revealing every tender, intricate, innermost part, at the same time shockingly bold and tremblingly delicate - it was the most beautiful thing imaginable. And when you leant into take in the scent, it gave off the rich, exotic, deep aroma of pure vanilla.
Some more pictures of things around the site are on my Flickr and I'll keep adding. This is a beautiful season.
This was going to be a really cool time lapse set where I was going to take one picture a day, but naturally I lamed out by June. Nevertheless: things growing.
And out of that time lapse came this, just one afternoons quick haul:
I grew it all organically, even! No fertilizer (well, compost) and no pesticides. Last night we had pesto & corn & green beans & salad for dinner - yum! Although this year has been bad for the bugs and I'm almost ready to haul out some Raid and go to town. They ate my eggplants, they killed my cucumber vines and now they are eating my tomatoes: ≡ Click to see image ≡
MGL, get Sevin liquid concentrate if you go the pesticide route. One of the less-nasty of the bunch. It is what I started using when the Japanese beetles got bad enough here that it was impossible to hand-pick them. Get a cheap sprayer at some box store and one red bottle of the concentrate and it will last you for a long time.
I hadn't even thought of it, but at least I went for a two-fer. The crystals most folks have readily available in the form of "hey, pretty rock!" aren't visibly growing.
Though I'd love to get into some micrography. I have a nice lab grade Bushnell 'scope, but it's missing the objective lens, and the 450x oil lens got damaged ages ago when I let a gradeschool classmate take over the controls. He promptly switched it over to max power and drove the lens right into the stage. "Hey, wait! What are you doing! STOP!" "Shut up, I know what I'm doing!" *crack, tinkle* I never spoke to him again.
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
photo by ethylene
