New Birmingham Library - Photos From Roof Garden

Ok, it has taken me along time to get downtown and see this amazing new library in the centre of Birmingham; however I finally got there yesterday. Wow! The building itself is neat enough but the inside space is enough to m,ake me want to go back and spend a day browsing. I love books. They also have various features to make it worth spending a littlte time there. Poetry workshops - and others of course, cafe, shop and wonderful views either from the roof garden or from the top floor viewing room.

I am sharing here a couple of photos taken from the roof garden. The day was bright but windy and cloudy. Good enough for a few shots however. Just to be different, I have taken screen-shots from Google Earth showing the direction of the shots for those who are not too familiar with the rapidly changing skyline of the centre of Birmingham.

Not much in the way of sky here as The sun was almost in my face. The amazing thing is the reflection in the building.

Secondly a view across The Hall Of Memory (War Memorial), the domed structure and down Navigation Street. A little brighter this time as the sun (or what there was of it as it was starting to rain) was well to my RHS.

And the explanatory screen shot from Google Earth

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.

Spring Flowers

I have been photogaphing the spring flowers in my garden with my new camera.

forget-me not

 

star magnolia

Bearded Iris

The garden and the flowers which bloom throughout the year have always been a great source of images for me. I love pottering with my camera, especially when the sun is shining. My new Coolpix camera has a feature to prevent images being blurred and I seem to be getting better close-ups with the macro feature. Here are a couple of examples.

You can see more of my garden / flower photographs on Redgage. See my profile on Redgage.

Redgage is a site that pays for content and links to your articles and images on other sites on the web why not give it a try. It is not a get-rich-quick site, far from it but does pay for work that you are posting on to the web in blogs or other sites.