Variations on a Theme

I took this photo from the passenger's seat of the car.  (No, I wasn't driving...)

Original Shot - SOOC

It's sort of "blah", but I knew what I was going after.

Cropped Image

That's a little more like it!  But while I had PS Elements open, I decided to play around a bit.  I really liked the way the clouds were swirling and I wanted to try to bring that out.  Here are a few things I came up with.

Adjusted Color Curves for Backlighting, and Mid-Tone Contrast

Here I really pumped up the Saturation and the Contrast - I love the warm hues

Then I chose "Solarize" in the Color Curves menu.  This was kind of cool!  I like the colors

Hey, what if I combine them into one??

Not too bad!  Maybe not museum quality, but for about 30 minutes of playing around, it's kinda cool.

Have fun out there!  :)

Much Love!

Tiffany

Lightning Photo

The light show we got last Friday night was so much FUN!  One amazing moment, I was able to get this photo.



The actual lightning tracing across the sky was phenominal!!

Here's the delima I face.  I will ponder "aloud", and if any of you have ideas, suggestions, or whatever, please comment and let me know!

Obviously there is a large part of the shot that is "blown out" - meaning, there is so much light that all you can see is white.  It cannot be adjusted in any way.

Here is an edit I did in PSE (Photoshop Elements).  I tried to darken the photo enough to be able to see the rest of the lightning without making it look completely fake.




No matter what I did, the middle was still just a white blob.  If I darkened it to the extreme, it looked somewhat contrived.  (and still had a large blown out middle.)  Although, now that I'm looking at it from the school's computer, it doesn't look all that bad....  What do you think?  Which one looks better on your moniter?




I wonder if I should use a polarizing filter or some other kind of filter while shooting lightning in order to avoid this.  OR  Is it completely imposible to avoid this kind of blow out when there is that much lightning at once??  Anyone have any thoughts or ideas??

Of course, I'm thrilled that I even captured it at all!!!  What a light show it was!  More pictures of it in this post here and of the clouds and sunset that night here.


Much Love!

Tiffany

Sky Painting

The sky has got to be the most amazing canvas in all of creation!  It is constantly changing, moving, shifting, reflecting, absorbing....  I love the sky!

And I love storms!

During last Friday's storm, which you have already read about, the sun set.  OH WOW!  The colors in the sky were literally un-believable.  When the windows in my home started glowing the color of cantaloupe, I grabbed the camera and headed outside.

This is what the sky looked like from my front door.  (this is before I grabbed the tripod and started shooting the lightning that I posted yesterday.)








As the lightning drew my attention toward the storm in the east, I saw this rainbow.




The color you see in all of these pictures was the actual color of the sky!  I haven't done anything to enhance them or change the colors.

To show you the contrast and how cool it was, I took bettyl's idea from the comments on the post about the cliffs and downloaded autostitch from this site.  I had taken several shots from the middle of the street in front of the house with the idea of a panoramic.  This is the entire 360 degrees of the sky at sunset that night.  It wound up being kind of small, so I hope you can see it on this page.  I'm very happy with it though.



I may change the page and put this at the top of the blog where the flowers and canoe are now.  Hrrmmmm.....

I wish I had thought of this at the time - obviously it's too late now.  I should have turned the camera to take several portrait shots of the sky side by side so that my picture would have a little more height.  **sigh**  Oh well.... it's the process of learning, right?


Much Love!

Tiffany

Friday Night Storm

We had an AMAZING electrical storm this past Friday night.  I went outside after the storm had passed us and took pictures as it headed east.  The lightning was EVERYWHERE!!!  and it was nearly continuous!

I set up the tripod on the front deck and just kept snapping.  I missed some, of course, but I caught quite a bit!  I just kept snapping and snapping.  After I went inside, I just deleted any photo that didn't have lightning in it.  I took over 300 shots and ended the evening with over 70 that had some kind of lightning in the shot.

Here are some of the better shots I got.  I will show you the BEST shot tomorrow as I have some questions and things I'm pondering about it.  

I'm seriously considering trying to figure out how to do an HDR image.  (Combine two or three images so that they overlap.)  I think those last two images combined would be a very cool shot!



Much Love to all!

Tiffany