Tag Archives: B&W

Photo of the Month: Thunderhead

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Hi Folks:

October 4th already and I just realized this morning that I didn’t do a ‘Photo of the Month’ post for September.  Yeesh!  So, in the ‘better late than never‘ category…

September’s image wasn’t very hard to choose.  I wish I could take credit for the clouds, but someone else gets that honour.  It was one of those ‘grab shot’ images; I was downtown and walking along the Inner Harbour and the clouds were just amazing.  I made several series of images for panoramas, but this one was the best in my opinion.  I use Autopano Pro to combine my images into panoramas and process everything in Lightroom.  If anyone’s interested, this image was converted to B&W in Lightroom, and then ‘coloured’ using the split-tone settings of:

Highlights
Hue: 41
Saturation: 23

Balance: +100

Shadows
Hue: 0
Saturation: 0

It’s a sepia effect that I like.

Here’s the image:

Thunderhead

Okay, now go out and make some photographs!

Mike.

P.S.  I entered this image in the recent ‘Tip Squirrel Lightroom Competition‘.  If you want to see the original (before) image and Lightroom-processed (after) image together, you can do so here.

P.S. II, the Sequel: You can find more of our posts on photography and Lightroom tutorials here, and you can find links to over 200 other sites that have Lightroom tips, tutorials and videos here.

Photo of the Month

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Hi Folks:

Well, September descends upon us tomorrow – back to school for those who are so inclined, and the end of summer vacation for most.  On this last day of August I had a look through Lightroom to see that I made nearly a thousand images this month.  In the digital age there are many who make a thousand images a day, but I’m still from the film era, where I would get a dozen images from one roll of 120 film.  Anyway…

I’ve put a lot of thought into what to make my ‘photo of the month’ for August.  We had family visiting at the beginning of August, and while I made several ‘tourist’ shots, I’m not a people photographer at heart.  We went to two different car shows this month and there were some good prospects there, but I profiled an image of an automobile last month.

I met some old friends for lunch today as they passed through town, and in explaining to them what we like about Victoria I mentioned that this is largely a city of villages, each one unique, and yet forming a coherent whole.  We haven’t been everywhere in Victoria yet, not by a long shot, but of the various places we have toured Oak Bay is my favourite.  While a separate municipality from the city of Victoria proper they are adjunct, with Oak Bay covering the city’s southeastern shore.  From our walks there we’ve found that Oak Bay has a sense of neighbourhood and community that we really like.  To that end I thought I’d use one of my Oak Bay images for this month’s selection. Continue Reading →

Photo of the Month

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Hi Folks:  Well, if you promise not to mention that the ‘photo of the month’ post was due yesterday, I’ll pretend not to notice!

At a meeting of our local photography group recently, several people did presentations of images based on a specific theme.  Mine was on ‘faces’.  I should explain that I’m not a people photographer, and people appear in far less than 5% of my work.  I shot a wedding, once, and swore I would never do it again.  However, as a landscape photographer one thing I like to do is to look for ‘faces’ and things in other objects.  Sometimes they’re fairly obvious and sometimes they’re more elusive.  If you go through my Flickr photostream you’ll find a number of such images, but I chose one to highlight as April’s photo of the month.  It’s a piece of driftwood I found along the shore on Dallas Road – nearly an entire tree, in fact, and there are some good size rocks embedded into the roots.  However, looked at from the bottom of the tree the shape forms a fairly good representation of a human skull. Continue Reading →

Photo of the Month

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Hi Folks:

I’ll get into the philosophic issues of pride and narcissism in another post perhaps, but since one of my great loves is photography, I thought I’d dedicate the last day of each month to a ‘Photo of the Month’ page. Basically this will be my favourite image of those I’ve made during the past month. If I go a whole month without making any photographs it will likely mean I’m in a coma or something like that. So, below is my favourite image for November, 2009. It may not be your favourite image from my work (you can see more here), and you don’t even have to like it. On the other hand, if you think it’s the best work you’ve ever seen I won’t be offended by that either!

Without further ado…

Driftwood Sculpture

Driftwood Sculpture

(click on the image for a larger version)

As humans we see the world in colour (or at least most of us do), but as photographers we can train ourselves to see the world differently – not just in terms of composition and ‘rules’, but we can begin to appreciate how to ‘see’ in black and white as well.  Some colour photographs are good specifically because of the colours contained in the image itself – the photgraph at the top of this page for example has a whole mix of colours from deep oranges through yellows and blues and into violet hues (although these show up better in a print than on screen) – but with black and white we strip away those colours, and the cues that we get from the colours themselves.  What we’re left with is form, shape, texture, hue, highlight, shadow…

This image was made along the shoreline at Dallas Road in Victoria, BC.  When I first saw it, this jumbled pile of bits and sticks reminded me of this story, one I wrote several years ago.  Using the power of the wind and the waves, with ocean water and stones for tools, a living sculpure is created.  If I’d come the previous day, or the following one, the image would have been different.  Sand castles are magical like that too.

Mike.

P.S.  As for the sign thrown back by the ocean, that’s closer to this story.