Photo of the Month – February

Posted on March 9, 2017 by Mike Nelson Pedde — Leave a reply

Hi Folks:

One of the things we love about Victoria is that there are always so many things to do (we have to choose from at least eight events that we know of for this Saturday). In February we like to participate in ‘Be A Tourist in Your Own Hometown‘, and as part of that we invested several hours at the world-famous Butchart Gardens. We even got shuttled there in CVS Tours‘ EV550 electric bus!

February was also bitterly cold (We had snow! In February!!) but being the brave pioneers that we are, we soldiered on. Because of the cold the flowers this year are severely retarded, but we had a wonderful time. There wasn’t as much colour, but still lots to see.

So, Marcia’s image first. In addition to the gardens, Butchart also has an inside floral display, which was packed full with orchids and so many different species of flowers of all shapes and sizes. There was our colour! Amidst the hustle and bustle of all of that beauty she found this quiet point of reflection:

Overflowing With Beauty

NB: Mike suggested several other (and equally fascinating) titles, like ‘One Good Urn Deserves Another’, ‘Taking an Urn for the Better’ and ‘Urn, Baby, Urn… Disco Inferno’ but she rejected them all in favour of her own idea (heavy sigh).

Since Marcia’s image was all about stillness, Mike’s was all about movement. Within the gardens there’s a building that houses an old-fashioned carnival merry-go-round. The children (and adults) riding on it had a lot of fun. Unfortunately there’s no way to capture the squeals and giggles in a still image but they’re there nonetheless.

Trans-Dimensional Fun

Okay. That’s it for today. Now go out and make some photographs!

Hugs,

M&M

Creative Use of the Lightroom Radial Filter

Posted on September 10, 2016 by Mike Nelson Pedde — 4 Comments ↓

Hi Folks:

It’s been a while since we did a Lightroom tutorial, so it must be time for another one. The Radial Filter is our focus this time; it’s the third and most recent of the three tools in Lightroom (the Adjustment Brush and the Graduated Filter being the other two) that allow you to target specific parts of the image by masking out certain areas and making adjustments to the rest. As such the Radial Filter uses the same layout and the same presets as the other two tools. Let’s get started. Continue Reading →

Photo of the Month – February

Posted on March 7, 2016 by Mike Nelson Pedde — Leave a reply

Hi Folks:

At the end of February we took advantage of the Be a Tourist in Your Own Hometown celebration to pay a visit to the world-famous Butchart Gardens. The Gardens were busy for this time of year, but not overly, and with a little patience we were able to wander around for several hours and make some good images. Below are two of them.

The first is an image made by Marcia in the Japanese Garden, converted to a monochrome sepia. And no, the white in the image is not snow, but moss. The mosses were so vibrant that day we needed to reduce the saturation on many of the images to make them look believable!

The second image was made by Mike in the Sunken Garden. This tree is a favourite of ours, and one of Marcia’s favourite images (for both of us) was made of this tree. The processing here was actually an accident, in part, but it looks as though the tree and surroundings are emerging slowly onto the page, radiating out from the centre.

Okay, that’s it.