A Daily Photograph - Have you been affected by the weather?

Wow, the weather seems to be so crazy at the moment, here in the UK it is all about floods. Due to heavy and continued rainfall coupled with high winds. The wettest start to a year for over 250 years. One thing that is being seen is that public spirited people seem to be pitching in everywhere - as well as the army and the rescue sevices. Even our young royals are doing their bit it seems.

My daily photograph shows the wet canal towpath only yards from our front door - BUT - and it is a big but, the canal flows through a cutting with 30 - 60 foot high sides as it flows under the bridge on our road.

Also, the roads around us all slope away because we are on a high point. So thankfully it is unlikely that we shall be affected by the flooding. Except of course by the inevitable cost of increased home insurance and the sure and certain rise in the sost of food as farmers experience difficulties.

See more photographs on the BBC News web site, which do show how bad the flooding is nationaly.

And for an explanation of why it is so bad see this explanation of the ground water issue.

But back to my photo, although the canal can look cold and uninviting, I have written an article on Squidoo of the many ways in which the canal and the towpath can be enjoyed; although I must admit many of the activities do rely on the weather behaving itself.

More photographs in the next post.

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.

Enjoy Your Local Canal Waterway

A very sunny afternoon last week was enjoyed by taking my camera with me for a walk along our local canal towpath.

A Moorhen, usually very timid. Took this using the optical zoom feature.

 

Here the "cut" is quite low, with fields and small-holdiings on both sides.

A field allowed to become a "natural" meadow.

Dandelion "clock" aka a seedhead, taken with the macro feature.

Dandelion flower, taken with the macro feature. 

A garden deck built out over the steep bank, here the cut is very deep; at least 80-100 feet.

I mentioned last time about a new Fujifilm Coolpix camera, and it seems to have far more options and features than my Samsung compact, so I thought I needed a crash course. After reading the manual, I decided to make use of the sun and get a little practical class with my camera. I took a number of photographs whilst enjoying a "walk in the country". 

As usual, i found the walk to be so very relaxing and couldn't help thinking about how little used the canal is as a source of fun / leisure activities. When I arrived back home I decided to write a new Squidoo lens about the issue. You can read the resulting article, Enjoy You Local Canal Waterway on Squidoo, hope you get the chance and enjoy it. Lots more photos contained on the page.