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Junk Yard

Several months ago someone in one of my photo groups organized a field trip to what she thought was a junk yard.  It was actually a scrap metal yard, so it was basically filled with piles and mountains of scrap metal in various stages of ruin and decay.   We spent a few hours wandering around making images.  The interest was in the details.  

 Saratoga bw

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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?

The Waterfalls

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A couple of weeks ago, I signed up to attend a photo field trip today to a location that is a short hike to a really beautiful waterfall.  After my hike yesterday I was pretty weary and half determined not to get up at 5:15 am this morning to get to the carpool location on time.

But then I thought that if I didn't go, I'd just sit around the house, bored and unproductive, so why not get up and go?

Although it was very cloudy and drizzly this morning, it never actually rained, thank goodness. 

The cloudy conditions contributed to the intense colors of the foliage and rocks, and it was easy to 

avoid the sky at this particular location.  So all in all, it was a good day

and I'm glad I convinced myself to get out of bed and get there on time.   

I don't know the people in this first image, but I love the image anyway.  I love how they are relatively sharp, while the waterfall in the background and the tree branch in the foreground are soft.  

I recently purchased Photoshop Elements 10.  It has some fun special effects that are very easy to do.  Since the images in most of my recent posts have been straight, traditional images, I decided to try a couple of the special effects in Elements 10.  All but one of the images in this post have had an effect applied.  Such fun.