The first snow this year came October 19th. A thick layer of soft, wet snow – in huge flakes. I’ve never seen that huge snowflakes in my life! This photo isn’t a very good illustration of the beautiful sight of yellow leaved birches being covered with the cold whipped cream, like illuminating the snow and giving it some of their colour in the grim autumn morning light. The best shots would’ve been available at the motor way – but I couldn’t stop there, especially not in that weather!
I think for this photo I used an extension tube with my macro lens. But to tell you the truth, I’m not sure about that. Anyway, the spider-looking thing is seed fluff from the yellow strawflower. Pretty neat, isn’t it :)
I’m hoping these photos look at least close to what they look like at my computer. My screen isn’t calibrated and yesterday’s trial order of a few prints came back very random-looking…
Yesterday after Spikey was gone I let the dogs out again. Pepe went back to look for him…
Guess what? No flowers today! Not yellow ones or any other colour either! Today I’m giving you something sharp but still so cuddly looking: A hedgehog!
This fellow lives in our garden. Hedgehogs move in the night, during the day they sleep. For some reason this one was on the move in the afternoon today – and my pooches went just crazy seeing him behind the garden swing! Of course the hedgehog huddled up and the pooches were powerless against its sharp spikes. I took the boys inside and came back with my camera – and some doggy treats. First Spikey remained an angry ball. I carefully tried to get some disturbing grasses away and he’d angrily hiss and growl – and jump! Have you seen a curled up hedgehog jump? It looks really funny! However, he smelled the doggy treats (yeah, hedgehogs love dog food) and cautiously started looking for them. I tried to catch his eyes and nose with my camera – but as soon as he heard the shutter click he’d huddle up again! And since it was overcast and low on light, this was the result with 1/40 seconds exposure:
Slowly he got used to the shutter sound and just munched away the treats from the grass, without minding my camera. I was using my 70-200 mm lens – its shortest focusing distance is 1,2 meters and at times Spikey came so close to me I couldn’t make the lens focus anymore!
When all the treats were gone he didn’t care sticking around anymore. And he still was convinced that I was to be totally ignored. So off he went and disappeared under a huge spruce. But I finally caught both his nose and eye in the same picture!
I guess you all are getting sick and tired of these yellow flowers. But I can’t help it – I love them and I have many good photos of them in my archives – and no time or energy to go out and shoot something new!
I guess the extra light ball under the flower should’ve been cloned out… But I didn’t, at least not yet. This is pretty much SOOC.
Been sick and everyone else in this house have been sick too… Trying to resume posting!
September is pretty much gone. It’s been exceptionally warm in Finland this year – but now everything is supposed to change. After tomorrow the week shows “highs” of only +10°C – nights awfully close to the freezing point! This is in the south – in the north there’s a chance for sleet or snow *shivers*
So, in this light my photo, entitled “Takeoff” seems very timely. I doubt there will be any more butterflies at sight this year…
I think I mentioned you that I have a lot of photos of these yellow flowers. Today I shot some more… I think the flower is a strawflower. This shot was taken with my Lensbaby 3G. It’s a completely manual, selective-focus lens and it gives some beautiful effects if you just invest some time on it.
Truthfully, with no modesty, I really like how this one turned out!
I have a lot of photos of these lovely yellow flowers that have brightened our yard the entire summer. This one is my computer desktop image at the moment and I really, really like it very much. Even though this photo was taken over a month ago it sort of fits today even better. The summer is almost over – and it’s as if this flower was saying that too. After the already dark, cold nights and chilly nights it’s half closed, half open, reaching for the last warm sunrays.
Today I’m not giving you my own pics. I don’t know who took these but it was someone way before I was even born! The oldest photo is almost 70 years old and even the newest one about 50 years. They’re from an old photo album of a friend and my first task was to scan them.
Usually I limit my photo editing to the minimum. Sometimes I have to use editing to salvage some unsuccessful shots but I’m always trying to take photos that need only very slight sharpening and levels/saturation fix, if anything. However, sometimes photo editing skills can be very useful. Take these photos, for example. They all were very small – so small that in the tiniest one even with a magnifying class it was almost impossible to recognise any people. After some retouching work and printing I was able to make the owner of these photos very happy.
And remember – my photo editing/retouching skills are very basic. Someone who really knows how to use Photoshop (I only have Photoshop Elements) would probably be able to do some real magic to pics like these!
This first one was the best quality-wise – but it was very, very small. It was taken maybe 50 years ago, give or take a few years. I lightened the shadows to get some detail out of the darkest places, then added some sharpening and contrast. This was easy.
Scanned original (width maybe 7 cm/about 3 inches, if not less):
Retouched version. It printed out really nice in 10 x 15 cm (4 x 6 inches)
The second photo was the clearest when it comes to detail – but as you see it was very, very dark. And small – maybe 5 cm/2 inches in width. So I had to lighten it a lot, sharpen pretty heavily and bring out some tones – plus remove some of the brownness/yellowness too.
Retouched version. Printed out really good in width 10 cm/4 inches. As you see I’ve also removed some scratches and the black gutter above the peoples’ heads.
Third – and the most challenging one. The pic is almost 70 years old (the little girl in the middle of the picture turned 70 yesterday) and it was badly damaged – as well as torn very tightly around the people. Not only I had to remove some brown stains but fix lightness and sharpness – not to mention creating details where it was missing due to the folds! Others I managed pretty well, I think – but couldn’t really fix the baby’s eyes. Even after fixing you can still see traces of the horizontal fold.
Retouched version. It too printed very nicely in 10 x 15 cm / 4 x 6 in.
Old pictures are just great – and you really can improve or even save them digitally!
