I recently took this photo of the cattails and thought them to be somewhat interesting since there were three of them beginning to shed their seeds. It reminded me of a lesson we had in varsity scouts one time when we started fires using cattails and cactus plants. The cattails had to be in the shedding season and not at the end of the first year so that the wood could have air sucked up through the fibers in the stem. In other words the fact that they were dried out meant the water that is in the stem by the end of the first year will have a chance to dry out by the end of the second year. If you want to learn more about this I'll have to do it one on one. It was the first time that I had actually started a fire using that method.
Anyway I thought that they would make a neat picture so I zoomed in on them and took the picture with a wide open lens setting so that the rather busy background trees and brush would be blurred out. It worked except for the fact that it was a somewhat cloudy day so the lighting was all very soft and all the same. This left me with an image where the foreground and the background were hard to distinguish from each other because there was no difference in the intensity of the light. So in thinking about this image I decided to see if in photoshop I could separate the two areas and make the cattails stand out a little bit more. Well here is the results. You decide which you like. To do this to the photo I had to use a layer mask which has recently been something I have spent a lot of time learning and practicing. I really don't know how I worked on images before without them because they make it so much easier to get results from your mind to the image.
3 comments:
Kent, I see what you mean about the first photo being the same color, but it is still a very interesting picture with a lot of detail to study and enjoy. The second photo is very beautiful. The simplest objects can become art when seen and photographed with your artistic eye. Is Photoshop terribly expensive? You do such wonderful things with it.
It depends on which version you can get. The entire package is over $1,000.00 and the version I use is around $600.00 or so. I am able to do upgrades now though so it ends up being around $400.00 instead. I am currently looking to buy Corel Painter X and it is around $600 but I took a class in it last week and I could really have fun learning how to paint (I hope it is never too late) but the things that can be done with that program would add a touch of class that I would love to explore. I'll have to do a couple weddings tough before it can become reality and I hope I don't forget everything by then. (We spent an hour alone on doing eyes.)
The new program sounds right up your alley. Wow, photography isn't a cheap hobby (or in your case, obsession), but thankfully all of us benefit from your skill. I hope you get your weddings so you can buy the program. Tell Marie hello for me, I wish we could get together and have a long talk. I love you two!
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