The Rollright Stones and Avebury

Just back from a visit to Wiltshire, famous for its neolithic megalithic monuments. Of coures I took my camera.

 Adam and Eve, part of the Avebury monument

 The Swindon Stone, Avebury's largest standing stone

 The king's men at Rollright Stones

A close up of some of The king's men

I guess it has been a while since I posted here, but to be honest i have found a new venue for my writing, where I can write about all the subjects which I blog about and get paid quite handsomely for it. What is more people actually come to look at my posts and connect with each other.

Should you feel like trying this new site out visit Bubblews I have almost decided to mothball my several blogger blogs including this one for the immediate future at any rate.

Images of Cleeve HIll

Spent a couple of beautiful days (for early March) at Cleeve Hill, at one of our favourite hotels. The weather was too good to miss an opportunity for a little photography even though we have many images of the area.
It was very sunny with a heavy haze shrouding the distance. Cleeve Hill is the highest point in the Cotswold hills and offers a view of 90 miles on a clear day. This weekend the view was very much curtailed by the haze but nevertheless, the camera was used frequently.

Wonderful place to live, at least in the summer.

 The Hill, just behind the hotel, is a favourite for a very rich source of subjects. A wide variety of natural beauty and architecture, many images from here litter this blog. For example, architecture and scenery at nearby Winchcombe. Although looking back for a couple of links, there really aren't as many as I thought. Mmmm, something to put right!

Higher up the hill, limestone craggs.

Because it was so early in the year, sunset came early and almost surprised me, I took the first of these shots from our hotel room - throught the window - and the second as the light faded and lights came on in Bishops Cleeve below the Hill.

Bishops Cleeve at twilight, the line at right is the M5 motorway

The haze is still apparent in these photographs, but I think it adds to the charm, don't you.

One photograph on the Hill, which I later played with in Photoshop, was an image of a stand of trees. I was playing with all sorts of effects and this one, INVERSE, struck me as very interesting. An air of mystery pervades the image.

Finally for today, I have an image taken of Hailes Abbey, which is just down the road near Winchcombe. Unfortunately closed for another two weeks or so but I managed to take a few photos over a fence at the rear. A very interesting ruin, built in the thirteenth century, currently owned bby the National Trust.

I really must add more images of Cleeve Hill, I can't understand why our favourite weekend spot has not been better represented in this photo journal. Back with more soon.

Buzzards, a new sculpture in Malvern

Visited Malvern this week (bought lots of second hand books) and saw this new sculpture in Rose Bank Gardens just above Bell Vue Terrace. It was added in November to celebrate the Queen's Jubilee as the gardens were being updated. We saw the sculture from well away and I couldn't resist find what it was all about.

As a complete contrast, here is a photograph of a lilac tree after a recent small snowfall.

It wwas actually taken thru the kitchen window with a 10x zoom, when I thought I saw a small bird in the branches. It was actually a blue plastic hook from a chinese lantern which had blown away in the winter winds. I photoshopped it out. LOL

Another failed shot....................

Photographing Artwork

I am never quite able to obtain the exact colours of a painting, and for my style of painting which relies on colour to a large extent, this is a nuisance. I always try to photograph artwork in daylight but it is not infallible. Here are a few examples of the differences which I find in one piece of art.

Firstly, the image from a photograph taken at night

under light from ordinary incandescent light bulbs. 

A washed out appearance results. 

The Blue in the sky is almost grey and 

the red on the horizon has become orange,

I applied an image/adjustment selecting auto-levels from the 

menus, this made quite a difference. The blue in the sky 

was bought out quite well and the sillouettes of the trees 

were much closer to the original painting. The red on the horizon

however, was still far too orange.

I used the hue/saturation tool to try to change the redness 

of that colour on the horizon.

This now has a feel of the original painting but is just not right. Trying to place this for sale on the internet would simply not be fair to the prospective buyers. DO NOT take photographs under the wrong sort of light.

Now, let's see a photograph taken in daylight. This 

was again a very washed out image, but note the 

colours. The blue is OK and the red now looks red.

I again selected the auto-levels and this again adds

contrast to the image, but still not strong enough.

I now selected the brightness/contrast tool and reduced 

the brightness to bring back the solid sillouettes.

It now looks very close to the original painting.

I do not consider this editing to be cheating, since I am simply re-creating the atmosphere of the original painting. In my work which, as I said relies upon colour and tonal contrasts, this is absolutely vital to create the right impression of the artwork.

The issue here I think is that I took the natural daylight photo quite early  (early February) in a room close to a window and the light was probably not strong enough to give the correct tonal values. I do not have a set-up to achieve this sort of image without this minor editing, although it does produce a profound effect.

Finally, I do play with photoshop sometimes but will always say so when I do ...............

......................... smiles!

The limitations of my camera

I was in a hide (i.e. a wooden building with a smallish window) at a garden centre / farm shop this week and found myself watching a procession of wild life partaking of the fruit and veg and stale loaves which were laid in front of the hide - specifically to attract them, of course.

I had my compact camera with me but the limitations have been made painfully obvious by the images captured. The wild life was at a distance from the window and I used an optical zoom to bring them closer. The resulting images are mostly blurred, I did not have a tripod but for some used the windowsill to steady the camera. This explains the difference in degree of blur. All the photos have been heavily cropped.

  A muntjak deer, never seen one of these at this feeding ground before

 woodpecker

 deer and friend?

 thrush

 blue tit

?

I will have to make sure that if expecting this sort of outing again, I have a tripod handy in my pocket.

More Photoshop Fun

Following on from the last post, I was still playing around with the same image in Photoshop and using various filters just to see what I could achieve. I really must make a note of what I am doing so that when something works, something turns up which I like, I can do it again. I could even let you know what I did. But unforrtunately for this piece, I only remember working with blend modes. One of the actions gave this shimmering effect to the tops of the tree branches.

I will be trying to repeat this so I hope that I will be able to return and let you in on the process; or maybe you know and could leave me a comment. I would be very grateful. There are only two layers, thte original photo and a layer of blue for the sky, which was a new layer and painted in using the paaint bucket tool). And then blended, so I should be aable to sus out what I did.

But just for now this is the edited image (see the previous post for the original):-

I have also been creating "miniworlds" using the filter, distort/polar cordinates. Saw this on a blog by a fellow Redgage user (lensbaby) and got caught up with the idea.

This was a photo of a group of trees on Cleeve Hill

And this was taken in Lanzarote, the white buildings are the hotel we stayed in

Find more examples on Redgage

Colourising and Blending Layers in Photoshop

Blending layers is one area wher I have not had much success in understanding what can be done, however I took some more photographs of the weather which has hit us this week. Very cold and trees covered in hoar frost.

This gave an opportunity for a few shots along the local canal, here is one from a road bridge looking straight down the canal.

There was not a lot ofcolour in the shot because of thet light conditions, especially in the sky. So I thought that it was a good image to plat around with. My first thought was to desaturate to turn it into a B&W image, a little mod to the contrast and brightness gave:

Not much of an improvement really, so what would happen if I tried to increase the colour, or even alter the hues:

Looking even better, but that sky is impervious to anything; there just isn't anything there to work with. I then added a new layer which I flooded with a "sky" blue colour. I pulled the transparency back to approx 50% and it gave a very acceptable sky. BUT the rest of the picture was hidden behind a semi-transparent blue layer, altering the colour, creating a lack of contrast and even looking out of focus thru the new layer.

What to do? Well I knew that laters could be blended but had never really tried out the combinations. Time to play! I hit first time on the multiplcation setting ( it was at the top of a drop down list) and it seemed to cause the new layer to vanish or become invisible over all existing pixels. Voila, a blue sky added to an unchanged image. Sheer luck, but now I have a reason to learn the why's and wherefores of blending options. Here is a composite of the four "final Images":

The first is the desaturated image, the next three are the original, and two with edited hues plus the top layer (50% transparency) and blend method set to multiply.

I still have much to learn about this great tool!

If you want to see more images from this cold spell, browse over to Redgage, I am using this site more and more because it pays for visits to your content. The amount depends upon how active you are and how much you promote your content on the site. Why not start your own account? It may not make you rich in a hurry but remember the tortoise and the hare.