6/366

Fallen Leaves

Until about 2 years ago I lived in an area of the country where the Fall colors could rock your world.

Not so much now.  I feel like I'm lucky to see any color, but on the plus side, the weather is better here.  I spent some time today walking around one of the college campuses hoping to see some photo ops.  There weren't too many of them, but then I saw this piles of leaves.

This is hardly a world class photo, but it speaks of the season. 

Just For Fun

82/365

A good friend of mine celebrates her birthday at the end of March while I'm still in Hawaii.  I promised to take her out for brunch after I returned to NY.  Yesterday was the day.  We went to this great little place called Grapevine Farms that has the sweetest dining room/gift shop/wine cellar ever.

Between taking our time with our meal and wandering around the gift shop, we practically made a day of it.  It was wonderful.

Today, I went to another friend's house to help her figure out how to use her point & shoot camera.  I have the same one--she has a super-duper camera manual, so between the two of us and the manual, we managed to have a great time trying the special-effects functions on the camera.  

These first two images show the fish-eye effect, my personal favorite.  My friend isn't too impressed with it, but it's an effect that I really enjoy working with, even though it's not strictly a pure fish-eye.  It's just funky enough to be fun enough to use once in a while.

This next effects is selective color.  Although the composition isn't anything to write home about, the technique is so cool.  After putting the camera on the "selective color" function, you point the camera at the color you want to isolate, take the picture, and voila!!

And then!!!!  What fun.  This is called "color switch".  What a hoot.

The next two are just close-ups of flowers. But really, the lens is about 1.5 inches away from the subject.  If it's bright enough and there's no wind, you can get some great macro images.

No special effects on these last two.  Unless you want to call a slow shutter speed a special effect.  So that combined with some beautiful color in the sky and this is what you get.  I rested the camera on the picnic table because the shutter speed was so slow. I used a high ISO, so when they're enlarged they're very grainy.  But in small versions, they look pretty iconic.

 Saratoga bw

81/365

Three of us went to Saratoga this past Tuesday for a field trip.  The "assignment" was bw street photography.  We put our cameras on the bw function and shot everything in bw.  Well....., almost everything.

We each had the same 7-point checklist and our goal was to get images that fit each of the 7 points.  The images here are not the ones I'm using for my assignment.  I might post them after we have our meeting.  But in the meantime, these are some of the other images I got that day.

Saratoga wasn't as crowded as we had hoped it would be.  That made it a little more challenging to get the kinds of street images I was hoping for.  But it was still great being out in the beautiful weather with good friends doing what we love to do~~photography.

I saw these plants on an outside window sill and loved the way they looked.

But after getting the image in bw, I decided to switch to color to see how it would look.  I actually like this particular scene better in color.  What do you think?

I Couldn't Resist  

The Black Thumb Tries Again

79/365

I have a notoriously "black thumb" when it comes to growing things in a garden.  Actually, a good part of it is that I'm just too cheap to buy the plants each year, and too lazy to plant them and then care for them once they're planted.  So the only things that grow and bloom around my yard are hosta,  which is all-but-impossible-to-kill, and orange day-lilies, which are equally hardy.  

And the bonus is that they both spread and thrive without any human intervention whatsoever!!!

Today, though, I just couldn't resist.  I saw these lilies for sale.  I bought three of this variation and two that are solid deep plum.  Now I just have to find the perfect place to plant them and trust that they'll thrive and propagate as profusely as the hosta and day-lilies.

Of course, that still only gives me "color" in late June/early July, but what the hey!  Something is better than nothing and it's all about baby steps.

Variations

72/365

No new images taken today. Waterfall images from last Sat. with just a wee bit of post-production adjustment.  A little color correction, a little sharpening--that's it.

These three images are variations of the same falls, taken from the practically the same spot.