The second picture was the original photo. I thought that it was great other than the fact that the holes in the trees where you could see the sky through the trees. So I stamped the foliage and placed it over the holes to cover the sky.

In the first picture I used a filter that would make the photo look like it was painted on a piece of canvas. I think this type of land scape looks like it is something that would be painted by a painter.

In the second I used a filter that made the feathers look like brush strokes. It also looks like it has been painted. It also hides little imperfections in the picture.

In the original photo the mail box blended into the tree line, so I lightened the tops of the trees, around the mail box and the sky a little to make the mail box stand out a little more.

These Pictures were kind of gloomy and dark straight off of the camera. So I played with the contrast and brightness settings to adjust the picture as I felt necessary. I then played with the HUE feature. I think that the best feature for these pictures was the single color adjustment. Because of the color of the leaves during this time of year, I adjusted the color RED and Yellow to pop out more at the viewer. I also played with the vibrancy feature and made the detail of the images more noticeable.

I am new to photo shop, and I had a hard time with the program. I started with GIMP, and that was next to impossible to use; then found the computers at CCV have photo shop on them. I just cut one image that I had taken and put it onto an other picture. Took me a long time, ha ha. Hope I get better at this.

Fall Landscape

I found that closing the aperture greatly improved the picture. I took some pictures with different aperture setting and because of the lighting a more closed aperture worked better. I found that even with using a tripod that it was hard to get a good clean picture. It was windy the day that I had taken the pictures and because of the distance of some of the pictures the camera wiggled in the wind. One of the pictures was closer and I didn't have that problem. Before I had posted these pictures to the blog, I had put them in Picasa and used the "I'm Feeling Lucky" feature to see what type of improvements I could get with the picture. I noticed that the colors are more vibrant and that the shadows are more enhanced. Besides the fact that it was REALLY cold out when I did this, and the wind wasn't helping, I am happy with the results.

Country Road

This is a slide show of a road just down from my house. Some pictures were not as I would have liked them to be, but I left them in anyways.

Cloud Mail

The Pictures that I took for the composition project were of my mail box in my front yard. I do believe that the second picture is by far better by using the Rule of Thirds. It adds so much more to the photograph. I chose to use the bottom right part of the grid because I read that keeping the horizon lower in the picture will look a lot better, and there were some trees to the right next to the road that I think would have been a distraction. I think that this true because the clouds give a great back ground.

The Simplicity of it all

I did some research on composition, and looked at a website link that dealt with nature photography. I found a little list of things to keep in mind when dealing with composition. The author said that the most important thing to keep in mind when dealing with composition is "simplicity". The author said to use a subtractive approach, instead of an additive approach. This will keep beautiful shots from being cluttered and over bearing.

Here is the Link for more information.

http://photoinf.com/General/Cub_Kahn/Beginner's_Guide_To_Nature_Photography.html

These three pictures were taken in different lighting conditions in two different days. In the second picture you can see shadowing on the siding of the building. I mixed up the lighting from sunny parts of the day to cloudy parts of the day. I wish the weather had been better for this project.

Color Schemes

The first picture is an example of a Monochrome color scheme, you notice the different hues of green in the leaves and apples on the tree.

The second picture is an example of a Complementary color scheme, the oranges and reds are the forground and the browns, greens and grays are the back ground.

Quirky Quacks

Here is my collage of pictures of ducks. There is different back grounds in all of the pictures and different details in the feathers. I used different apertures and lighting combinations for these pictures. I really like the colors of the feathers and some of the vivid detail that you can see in them.

A Season Passed

• The two pictures that I decided to choose were of an apple tree that I photographed just after the apples had been picked. The first picture was taken with the Scene preset on my camera with the Foliage function. The second was taken with the cameras Auto preset. Both were taken off hand.

• Both of the pictures were taken with the same camera, at slightly different angles. The first picture was a little further away than the second one. The first picture shows a truer green, and has better detail in the colors and shadows. The second one looks as though it was faded or washed out. I think this has to do with the colors in the picture and the direction the picture was taken at, because the sun played a role in how the back ground played into the second picture. It was bright out, and the camera caught that, and it made more of a distraction from the object photographed. The first picture had a bright back ground, but not as bad as the second picture. I think that that was because the Foliage function catches the vibrant greens, and that is what "pops out" at you. Also with some editing, the bright back ground could be fixed. I think that both pictures would have been better if the camera was on a tripod, because I seam to wiggle a little and the pictures aren't as crisp as I would like them to be.