iOS and Mac developer
I haven’t done one of these for a while, but the dark clouds inspired me to make an HDR image.
I spent most of the weekend (when I wasn’t working around the house & garden) writing some Cocoa code for FriendFeed. So far I only support the features that don’t require authentication.
I’ve never seen a caladium flower before, so I had to take a picture of it. I didn’t have my D40x with me, so I took this with my iPhone.
The D40 or D40x’s sport mode isn’t only for sports. It’s great for any time you want to capture fast action at the highest possible shutter speed. Using continuous shooting mode you can capture action at 1/500 or 1/1000 second shutter speed. I was able to capture this Polynesian dancer’s torch in midair.
Today was Oakland Park’s Youth Day, one of our biggest events. I took over 2000 photos, which I’m still processing. I used the sport mode of the D40x and did lots of burst mode shooting of Brazilian Capoeira, Polynesian dancing, and martial arts events. Here’s the best shot I found so far. I managed to catch this guy in midair during a Capoeira demonstration. I’ll upload more photos when I finish sorting & processing them.
Aperture 2.1 had no problem handling that many photos in a single project. It took about 5 minutes to import from the memory card.
You’ve probably seen photos where most of it is black & white with one bit colorized. If you have a photo with a strong contrast between subject and background, it’s pretty easy to do in Photoshop.
Earlier today I took this picture of roses blooming in my neighbor’s garden. I used the largest aperture for my lens (F5.6) to bring out the subject and blur the background slightly.
Since there was a pretty strong contrast between the flowers and the background, it was pretty easy to use Photoshop’s color range selection tool to select the flowers only. I then inverted the selection and made an adjustment layer based on the selection. In the adjustment layer, I used hue/saturation to desaturate it and darken it slightly.
Here’s the final result.
Fascinating story found at Flickr (Mundo Uno Photo Pool):
Hessy Levinsons was born in 1934. When she was six months old, Hessy was taken to a leading Berlin photographer to have her portrait taken. A few months later this picture appeared on the cover of the Nazi publication, "Sonne ins Haus" [Sun in the House]. Frightened by the possible consequences of their exposure as foreign-born Jews, Hessy’s mother rushed to the photographer. He explained that he had known she was a Jewish child and had deliberately submitted her photograph to a contest for the most beautiful Aryan baby in order to ridicule Nazi racial theory, and Hessy was selected as winner of the contest among all the German babies.
Several months later an aunt in Memel recognized Hessy’s portrait on a picture postcard in a local store and sent it to the Levinsons in Berlin. The card was captioned "Best wishes for the birthday." After the publication of her photograph Hessy was kept largely at home lest she be recognized in the street and her parents questioned about her identity.
In 1936 her father was arrested by the Gestapo on a trumped-up tax charge. He was released only after his accountant, a Nazi party member, came to his defense. Following this incident the Levinsons left for Latvia, where they remained for a year until deciding to move to Paris in 1938. The family had fully reestablished itself when the Germans entered Paris. Her father Jacob applied for American visas but had no way of knowing when they might come through. In 1941, when the round-up of foreign Jews began in Paris, the Levinsons fled to Memac-sur-Mer, a coastal town near Bordeaux. From there they were led by members of the French resistance to Nice.
In the meantime Jacob received notice that their American visas had arrived, but that only 45 days remained to get to the U.S. before the visas would expire. Unable to find immediate transport to the United States, Jacob applied for an extension of their U.S. visas. The U.S. Department of Immigration denied these extensions.
Jacob then secured Cuban visas for the family and booked passage on the Serpa Pinto, a Portuguese ship that left from Lisbon in early in 1942 for Havana. The family spent the next seven years in the Cuban capital, where Hessy and her sister grew up. In 1948 the Levinsons reapplied for immigration to the U.S. and arrived in New York in 1949.
Baby picture of Hessy Levinsons, the Jewish winner of the most beautiful Aryan baby contest, published on the cover of the German publication, "Sonne ins Haus: Illustrierte Familienzeitschrift mit Versicherung."
Photo posted by michelleSoeMoe, courtesy of www.ushmm.org.
I really like the aged photo effect you can create at this Japanese website, so I attempted to duplicate the effect in Photoshop. These pictures I took in San Francisco last year seemed to be a good subject.
For my first attempt, I used the Aperture 2.1’s sepia tone & vignette effects and then used Photoshop’s film grain filter. The result was a little too bright and didn’t really look aged enough.
Finally, I got an effect I really like with a few Photoshop actions. I used the Sepia Tone Grayscale action, the Spatter Frame action, and the add noise filter.
Here’s the original version of the second photo.
Everything is blooming in my garden, so I have 3 great pictures for today. I find that I prefer using Aperture Priority mode rather than program automatic, especially when I’m photographing flowers. It isn’t any more difficult than automatic and gives me more control while still giving the correct exposure. I like to use a large aperture to get a narrow DOF, which I think looks better for these shots. I’ve been shooting raw almost all the time now, since I can still get over 600 shots on my 8GB SD card and it lets me do more adjustments.
I planted this calla lilly today. It was my mother’s favorite flower.
I noticed this beautiful rose and had to take a picture of it. I used my Nikkor 50mm/f1.8 lens with the maximum aperture of f1.8 in Aperture Priority mode, which gives a very sharp image with a narrow DOF.
