subtle changes

There will be two images to this post. They both were taken approximately one minute apart, used only natural light, and the spider did not move. The only thing that i changed was the exposure and my camera angle.
For the top image i exposed for the sky and let the spider go to black. I started by only having sky behind it and then included the trees at the bottom and left. For the image below i exposed for the spider and raised my camera up so that i got no sky and only trees in the background.
It was getting dark so i had to use an iso of 1250 and a fairly slow shutter speed. In photoshop i did a fairly heavy curve to each image. Mainly increasing the highlights and darkening the three quarter tones. I also added saturation to the top image to bring out the blue of the sky a bit more. In the original photo the sky was more of a baby blue and was really blah. I sharpened the photos quite a bit, amount of 50 to the bottom one and 100 to the top.
I have taken a pile of photos lately which i really like and i am truly surprised that i am posting two shots of spiders that i shot out my bathroom window about an hour ago. I had planned on posting an image i took this morning which used 4 strobes, two hidden in the scene, and which i did alot of photoshop work on. Guess that will have to wait.

masking black and white

My neighbor is always fixing or building something so i thought i would take some shots of his most recent project, making one good lawn tractor out of two. As i may have mentioned a couple posts ago, i am trying to change up the way i shoot a bit. This image may not reflect that but i shot alot and did have some progress on some of the other images.
In photoshop i opened an image that i had converted to black and white in lightroom. I then went back to lightroom and converted it back to color and opened that one too. In photoshop drag the black and white image onto the color image while holding down the shift key (this will center it). Since they are the exact same photo they are already aligned and the only thing left to do is to create a layer mask on the top (black and white) layer. I painted over the lawn tractor with a brush set to a low opacity, mabey 20% and just built it up until i had the amount of color i wanted showing through.

blending multiple frames

As i mentioned yesterday, i set my camera on high speed drive and these are the four frames i got. I didn't really plan for this but it all worked out quite nicely.
I opened all four images in photoshop and then selected all the layers together. I went to the edit menu and hit align layers. I then used layer masks on the layers to show through the guy doing the trick in his different positions. It is a little friggy figuring out what layers to apply the mask to first and to help me i turned the visibility off on the other two layers that i was not using at the time. That meant i had two layers visible and i could lower the opacity on the top one so i could see where to apply my mask. Sorry to be confusing on this one.

happy canada day

I had some fun today and shot a ton of photos.
It started with a basketball game in the driveway, on to a slippy slide on the lawn, and then off for a walk downtown to take in some canada day events. Oh, and photographed my friend and son taking apart two ride on lawn mowers.
So as i mentioned i have a ton of photos ready to post. I will be adding daily for the next little while.
I really enjoyed last months black and white theme and thought i would continue it for awhile. I will let the images decide.
The shot above is from our walk downtown today. I saw this kid do an amazing jump on his skateboard in front of his friends. I did the stop, watch, and walk away, when i noticed that he was heading up for another run. I rushed back and told him to hang on a sec. I did a test shot for exposure, set the focus, and put it on continous high speed motor drive. This was the first image of the series and it ended perfectly with him landing the jump on his board. He went through the faces of his friends however and i do wish that i had gotten as low as possible. Would have been neat to have him over their heads.
Part of my reasoning for shooting lots today is that i am trying to change my style a bit. This photo is not much of a change but it may take awhile. I want to add more movement and candidness in to my shots. We will see what happens.
In photoshop i put a much darker layer of the image on top of the original exposure and then masked out the people in the shot. I wanted everything in the image darker than it was except the people. I also put a bit of a vignette on it.
Happy Canada Day to you all.