Laptop

Got a laptop this afternoon. Gonna make doing this blog/school work a little easier! Awesome to be mobile and awesome to get new toys. I looked at a program called Camtasia Studio for screen capturing but turns that program sucks ass. I think I'm going to have to use the one Mr.Kent suggested, screencapture o matic...

This Week

Just met with my teacher, Ian Kent. This week he wants me to make a couple Photoshop tutorials and post them on here. Probably going to make a video with a screen casting program or make a step by step guide with screen shots, haven't decided yet. I'm going to feel around for some ideas and test out the screen capture program to see how it works. Also need to come up with an idea for a tutorial, any suggestions?

Water Drop

This is a photo of a water drop, I had saw this tutorial in a magazine and decided to give it a try. What I did was suspend a plastic bag filled with water above a bowl filled with water. I then poked a hole in the bag and let it drip. After taking about 400 photos I stopped and went through them only to find 10 that were really worth keeping.

For the settings on my camera for this photo I used a fast shutter combined with the flash to freeze the water drops in place. I also used an aperture of 4 to blur out the background. Aperture settings allow you to control how much light passes through the lens and on to the image sensor. The lower the number the less light comes in giving less detail in the background.

For processing for this photo I only really turned the vibrance up a little just so it wasn't totally plain. Also turned  up the blacks a slight bit to help darken the background and add some more depth to the ripples in the water.

Valley Sunset

This photo was taken last summer in my Mom's back yard in Annapolis Royal. As I've shown in a few photos already I'm a pretty big fan of silhouettes as well sunsets. Sunsets give you awesome colours and silhouetting lets you put focus into a certain area of photo.

For this photo I did what i usually do for silhouettes and put my camera in program mode and dropped the exposure setting to -2 which allowed the foreground go black and become a silhouette.

This photo for processing I turned up the vibrance to about 95% to really bring out the colors and also turned the blacks up quite a bit to make the silhouettes more crisp and to also to bring out the little bit of cloud.

Another Wave

This photo was taken in the same place as the last wave on the same day. By looking at this photo its hard to grasp how big this wave actually was it had to be at least 15ft, maybe more. I like this photo because the wave is a perfect shape, the colour of the water, and the mist coming off the top of the wave. I also like how the wave is coming into an almost fits perfect into the mouth of this cove.

For this photo I had my camera on program to automatically set the aperture and shutter speed based on the exposure I wanted to have. For this photo the exposure was normal. Nothing special for this one.

For the processing I turned up the vibrance to bring out the colours in the sky and water. I had also turned up the blacks a bit to boost the shadows.

Wave

This photo was taken at Prospect High Head, which is a protected area between Prospect Village and Shad Bay. The area is mostly rocks and cliffs, but has a walking trail that winds through. On windy days the waves crash up over the rocks as seen in this photo.

For this photo I put my camera in shutter priority and adjusted the shutter speed to 1/15 which allowed the crashing wave to blur and kind of almost wrap around the rock rather than just freezing it in place. Once i took the image i noticed it was a little over exposed.

for post processing I adjusted the vibrance to make the sky and foreground a bit more colourful. Because the image was a little over exposed due to the slow shutter speed, I brought down the exposure to -2. I also turned up the blacks a little to bring out the shadows in around the water to give more detail to the wave so didn't appear like a flat white mass.

Butcher Hill Falls

These two photos are of Butcher Hill Falls in Upper Stewiacke. I took these photos because I always wanted to take a long exposure of a waterfall. These photos were taken in early May 2011. These two photos are my all time favourite photos that I have taken.

For Camera settings for these photos I put my camera in shutter priority and set the shutter speed for 30 seconds. I then put my camera on my tripod to minimize movement and screwed what is called a neutral density filter on the end of my lens. ND filters allow for longer exposures during the day by limiting the amount of light that enters the lens. less light equals a longer shutter speed. ND filters come in different strengths. for this photo I used 2 filters put together, ND4 and ND8,  to allow me to get a 30 second exposure.

For these pictures I used different processing settings. For the top photo I turned vibrance all the way down, making the photo almost black and white to make the wet rocks darker and to make the water stand out. Then I turned the saturation up to bring out the colour of the grass and the trees enough that it wasn't overpowering the rest of the image. If I would have done it the other way around the wet rocks would have come out slightly green because of the moss and algae drawing more focus to them instead of the water.

The bottom image I wanted to look a little more traditional so I turned up the vibrance and the blacks a tiny bit to boost colour and shadows and left the saturation alone.