Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas, originally uploaded by Jersey Rich.

Merry Christmas to everyone. One important fact to remember is the Jesus is the reason for the season.

This was a time exposure. I triggered the camera with the remote and had it set to a long exposure time. This was strictly by trial and error. After I got the exposure time nailed down, I started playing with drawing various shapes. I tried to imagine a big poster board mounted in front of me and knew that this would be one long line of light. I was pretty happy with the results. Enjoy your holdiays......God Bless All!!!

A Charlie Brown Christmas Tree?

A Charlie Brown Christmas Tree?, originally uploaded by Jersey Rich.

Winter finally arrived. We had an ice storm that coated everything. This plant was heavily coated with ice. Many of the plants would break and parts of them would fall off when you touched them. I was able to capture a lot of good shots. Later in the afternoon the sun broke thru the clouds and the beautiful ice was gone within a half an hour.

Looking into the Sun

Looking into the Sun, originally uploaded by Jersey Rich.

I only wish that I had a wider angle lens to capture the entire circle. This was shot using a Tamron 18-200 looking straight up. I keep the grid display turned on in my D80 so that I can try to align items such as this one.

Shy

This was from our recent trip to Florida. Taken in the Animal Kingdom at Disney, I found this guy/girl? off in a corner of the pond. I retouched and increased the saturation, added a blur filter, and increased the contrast to bring out the black in the beak and also darken the background shadows.

The image on the left is the original and the one on the right was the result of my editing efforts in Photoshop6. Why PS6? Because I got it for free! I've posted the image to a number of different group pools in Flickr and it's gotten many goood comments and awards. Personally, I didn't think it was all that good. I didn't like the way the edges of the trees looked with the gradiant I applied. I'm working on a couple of other ideas and will be posting them here.

More Photshop DA

These are latest attempts. I made use of the gradiant tool. This is a really handy tool that allows you to have complete control of how the color will blend, the direction it will blend from.

I took the picture of the Jesus statue about 2yrs ago. Although it looked neat to begin with I knew I could get a better look by tweaking the colors and adding the gradiants. I included before and after shots.

Digital Art - Flower and Stone

Here's another Photoshop image that I created from two pictures. I used a few more tools then the last post. I'm using Photoshop 6. It's a pretty steep learning curve. There's just so many things you can do and sometimes it's hard to figure out which way is the best way. It really depends on your workflow and what you're the most comfortable with.