Great Blue Herons aren’t rare around here, and at least three can be seen regularly fishing as the tide changes at Fern Cove.
I caught a few decent pictures of “Big Blue” in flight while I was over at my dad’s last week. They are very graceful birds, and very efficient fishers.
For Wordless Wednesday and Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Landscapes or Waterscapes.
The Old Chapel Bed and Breakfast at Bowness on Solway was where we started our Hadrian’s Wall Walk. But most people walk in the other direction, ending there. A lot of folks had left their hiking boots in the trash at the B&B, never wanting to see them again.
The proprietor had a sense of humor and she fished boots out of the trash and used them as planters.
The night we stayed before starting, we chatted with a pair of hikers who were finishing up, they showed off their significant blisters. It was intimidating.
However, they had walked the wall in three days (for contrast we took 11).
We didn’t have problems with blisters but, even so, we did leave my husband’s boots on a trash can on the next to last day of the hike.
His boots started to come apart on the third day (after Carlisle, the last city where we could have found replacements).
He tried tying them together with string, then, at one wonderful B&B (the Henshaw Barn, somewhere in the middle of the hike), the owner glued them together for him. That lasted a short time, but, finally, he had to give up and bid them farewell.
He walked the rest of the way in his non-hiking shoes.
The moral of the story is: ALWAYS make sure you can walk in any pair of shoes you bring along.
I’ve started a little artsy-fartsy project for this month, exploring a method I learned of recently called “chiaroscuro”. It was coined during the renaissance.
Painters of the Renaissance and Baroque periods wanted to engage their viewers. Like the cinematographers of classic Hollywood, they used the play of light and shadow to give life and drama to their images. The word chiaroscuro is Italian for light and shadow. It’s one of the classic techniques used in the works of artists like Rembrandt, da Vinci, and Caravaggio. It refers to the use of light and shadow to create the illusion of light from a specific source shining on the figures and objects in the painting. Along with linear perspective, chiaroscuro was one of the new techniques used by painters of the Renaissance to make their paintings look truly three-dimensional.
https://study.com/academy/lesson/chiaroscuro-in-art-definition-technique-artists-examples.html
Because June has naturally bright sunlight and the shadows that go with it, plus lots of flowers blooming, I am using flowers lit by the sun. Here are a few I’ve done in the past couple of days.
I intentionally looked for flowers that were in the sun where the background was shadowy. To make the photos more dramatic I used post processing. First in Raw Therapee (I shoot in Raw) I intentionally recovered as much detail as possible in highlights, keeping them as bright as possible without blowing out details, and darkening the shadows. Then, in the GIMP, I duplicated the image to a second layer then used the multiply blend mode, then adjusted the second layer’s opacity.
Do you ever challenge yourself to a project?
For Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Flowers. Seems appropriate, since this is intended to be a Fun Foto project! I’m hoping to learn to use the manual mode on my camera better and test out different post processing methods.
For the past year or so I’ve been studying black and white. Specifically using open-source software (the GIMP and Raw Therapee). It is very interesting to see how different elements catch your eye when you remove color.
Here are a few photos from the past few weeks.
Do you think it still feels like spring with the color removed?
This photo, with two variations shows how you can get different effects. I couldn’t decide which of these two black and whites to choose. In one the flowers stand out more from the background but there isn’t as much emphasis on the design on the petals. What do you think?
I chose this one because it is almost monochrome in green. It’s probably not a fair comparison because the black and white had the background darkened and blurred a bit. Maybe I should go in to the colored one and try to emulate that effect.
I was curious to see what would happen to this photo that doesn’t seem to have much color in it. It was a surprise to see that the black and white feels a bit warmer than the original.
For Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge and Brashley Photography’s Mid-Week Monochrome.
If you are interested in trying out these open source (free!) programs here are a couple of posts that might help: The photo processing tools on my belt.
In memorium of Armistice Day, and in appreciation for all veterans for their service.
When we were in England in 2018, the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, there was a very moving memorial installation based on poppies. It was an amazing work of art, both in the creation of every individual poppy and the very careful placement to get the overall effect.
For Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Dark Red.
For Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Orange and Green. This color combination seems like it is everywhere right now. Just a few examples from walking the pups today:
The Len’s Artist’s Challenge this week is also Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge One Single Flower.
Someone I met in Shouguang referred to his (many) fellow citizens who fished along the banks of the Mihe as “fish people”. One does not see a lot of catching so, perhaps, it is the act of fishing that is the goal.
For Becky of Winchester’s Lines & Squares: Day 15
…and Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Lines seems appropriate also: since these folks are having fun with lines.
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