Bicycle Enthusiasts

Get Well Effort with Humor

As the case with cancer patients, people my shave their heads in show of support with laughs and giggles along the way. The crew depicted above is showing support for one of their own by wearing mock neck braces for one of their own recovering from neck surgery. We wish Rob well, the prognosis looks very good. The shot was taken indoors color balanced for the flash and another shot balanced for ambient sodium vapor and blended together. The camera was set on maual +1 EV, 1/3 sec F 6.3, 17 mm 17-40 EFS, fired two remote 580 EX flashes either side of camera with ST-E2. Ambient was I believe 5.6. Thanks for looking.

Photo Of The Day

The trees where shot with a slow shutter speed and the camera gently rock upward during exposure to create the blur effect. Additional filters were ran in photo shop to add warmth and brillance in NIK EFEX Pro 3.0. Sharpen with unsharp mask in CS4. Thanks for looking as always.



Walking on my property this morning noticed these little guys under the trees from with last fall's leaves. Processed in CS4, Topaz "denoise" and "adjust" with vignette.

Tug Boat Water Color

The image here has been edited and played with in CS4, I am learning to experiment with my new set of pluggins from Topazlabs.com. Topaz makes a series of pluggins for Photoshop that work as described and are affordable in comparison to the many top brands at hundreds of dollars more. You can buy the entire CS$ suite for $150. Some of the functions seem to overlap, you can view online tutorials videos on each filter to get an idea of their function.
Each filer can be purchased seperately as well. Thanks for looking as I experiment with Topaz.

Don

Jumpin Tree Frog Batman

My grandsons Alex and Jayden captured a small tree frog in the yard, albeit 1 to 1.5 inches long. We grabbed a piece of black cloth as the even light faded, placed it and the from on the table outside. The yellow streak was from ambient light and the more green tones where from a flashlight. Three images are combined into on here using lighten as the blend mode. The images were taken with my Canon 10-22 mm. It seems to focus very well close up. My 40D images where heavily cropped in order to more fully fill the frame. In the end, the frog lived happily ever after in my back yard.

Stary Night

The Perseids peaked on Wednesday morning 2009-08-12 in the pre dawn sky. I took about 300 photos and only captured this one perseid. The wife was unimpressed. Asked if there were telescopes or something to shoot it with? This was taken with a wide angle lens, ISO 1000, f2.8 for 25 seconds each or so. Set on selftimer. The image has been through CS4 for add sky, frame, and various adjustments. The perseid itself is basically untouched.

About midnight I went out and played in the shide yard taking about 25 shots. 17-55 mm F8 15 to 60 secs.

A new layer breaths new life into the old dog

The top photo is one that I took in 2005, the other day at a baseball game I shot a sky and some clouds with my Canon G-9. As you can see in the original photo (above) the sky was either blown out in the highlights as well as the fact it was a pretty hazy washed out looking sky.

The car shot was up in Mt Vernon during the spring tulip bloom. That evening was one of my first outings with my NEW Canon 20D SLR. In 2009 these photos are still some of my favorite images.

1. Problem, washed out sky.
2. Solution, replace with new sky.

I opened both images and import the new sky into its own new layer with the car photo. An easy way to do this is choose duplicate layer and then tell it to place it in the opened car photo. I placed the new sky layer on top, and transformed the selection to fit the sky area. I made a sky selection on the original car photo, then inverted the selection, next held down the alt key while clicking on the new layer mask. I made a few adjustments to the mask and the flattened the image when satisfied. Did another curves and color adjustment, sharpened by choosing the filter menu, "other" High Pass, the choose overlay for blend mode. Next Ctrl+Alt +C to add a 1" white matte to background and presto new photo. The old dog breaths new life. As you can see I like lots of color and saturation. That's just me, I like them to pop and be fun.