155

The pond at Pond View Apartments. And what a view it is!

Exposure time: 1/400 s
Aperture: f/4.5
ISO: 200

154

Another drive-by shooting. This is the bridge between East Thetford, VT and Lyme, NH. Should I be worried about regularly driving on a bridge with so much rust?

Exposure time: 1/500 s
Aperture: f/5.0
ISO: 200

153

This is a drive-by shooting. At one point in time there was a huge field of yellow wild flowers between my home and Greg's home. One day he was doing the driving, so I had my camera out, taking random photos. The field that I intended to capture had been mowed, but this was a pretty good one too!

Exposure time: 1/500 s
Aperture: f/5.0
ISO: 200

152

It seems that I am behind with photos! I have a bunch of photos that have yet to make an appearance on the blog!

I present to you: chive flowers!



I really love this photo. It is the background image on my computer.

Exposure time: 1/640 s
Aperture: f/5.6
ISO: 320

151

Here is another view of the smoke in front of the setting sun. This was taken from the steps of the Cathedral, hence the St. Francis statue. The top left of the image shows some actual clouds in the sky, but the rest is all smoke from the wild fires near Santa Fe.

Exposure time: 1/125 s
Aperture: f/18
ISO: 250

$1.50

Smoke as seen from Santa Fe.
There are some pretty huge wild fires in the drier parts of the US. Two are very near Santa Fe. The smoke was most visible on this day, when it was blocking out the sunset, and putting an orange glow on the city. Most days the smoke was not really visible, but my eyes were so dry and itchy, which was probably due to smoke in the air.

Exposure time: 1/640 s
Aperture: f/5.3
ISO: 250

149

Here is a daisy in front of the barn. I might have already had another daisy photo on the blog, but it is so hard to not take pictures of these every time I walk past.

Exposure time: 1/200 s
Aperture: f/5.6
ISO: 500

148 - gimp week

So I wanted to do some gimping that did not involve color boosting as the main fix. Unfortunately, I didn't quite get to that this time around. I really like photos that have an antique-look to them. Or photos that have a prairie-look to them. I haven't yet taken a photo that I've been able to properly prairie-ize, so I present to you the last photo for this gimp week series.



It is, once again, of the color boost variety. This is a self portrait, as seen through Ian's sunglasses, when I was in Santa Fe for a conference recently.

147 - gimp week

This is another photo re-do. The original made an appearance on the blog exactly one month ago. It was published to the blog at a time when I was really seeing the advantage of boosting colors and contrast. I saw the original, and it just looked so dull, especially since I wanted to depict the awesomeness of what happened to this tree after being struck by lightening!

So here you have it. The photo re-do.

This tree was struck by LIGHTENING!

146 - gimp week

Welcome to the barn, where I live. We have the greenest grass and trees in the entire world. Or at least Gimp will make you think so.

For this photo I adjusted the color curve to resemble the one below.



I don't even know what is on each scale, but I know that this new color curve makes me happy. The curve started as the straight diagonal line through the center. I pulled the left end low and that seemed to majorly increase all of the saturation, which made the barn a bit more red and the grass and trees Very green. Then I pulled the right end high and that made the sky turn a very nice cyan, along with softening up the color of the roof of the barn.

145 - gimp week

For day 2 of Gimp week, I present to you this lovely photo of a dumpster. I had my polarizer on for this photo, so the blue sky was about as blue as it could be. Then I did some Gimp magic. I selected a small box just around the dumpster and made it extra-red. Then I selected a rectangle at the top that included all of the blue sky and made it slightly more blue, but I couldn't go too crazy or the trees that cut into the rectangle would have been all messed up. Then I just boosted the saturation to a really high amount. I think I might have lessened the lightness (thereby making it slightly darker) just a tad too.

Ta. Daa.
I actually took this photo specifically for using it in Gimp and playing with the color saturation since the blue and red were so great to start with. The edited version is SO much more vibrant, and I love it!

144 - gimp week

Hello all. I'm trying something new for this week. Lately I have been editing a lot of photos using Gimp which is basically a free equivalent of photoshop. It wasn't super easy to start using, but after playing around with it for months, things are going more smoothly. I didn't want to be one of those people who was always editing photos. In fact, I even refused to crop photos until I got to my seventy-first photo. But now I am starting to learn to use edits as more of an extension to the camera. I still strive to get exactly the photo I see with my eye, but sometimes I like to edit the photos in ways that are totally not possible to do with a camera alone.

So for this week (and possibly times in the future as well) I present to you all photos that have been edited in ways in which I prefer the result over the original photo.

For today, I present to you a better version of the tulip from last month.


This is how bright these tulips actually looked. However, they were located in a sort of median, and so, with cars on all sides of me, I ended up being careless and not paying attention to the fact that I was over exposing my photos. But alas, Gimp saves the day, and returns my photo to what I had envisioned.

143

Trees in full blossom and a nice rock wall, can't really go wrong with that (:

Exposure time: 1/250 s
Aperture: f/5.6
ISO: 320

142

Another one of the tree blossoms. The sky was quite grey at the time I took these, so I was glad to see a bit of that true color showed up in this photo.

Exposure time: 1/250 s
Aperture: f/5.6
ISO: 320

141

The bees also thought the trees were quite lovely.

Exposure time: 1/250 s
Aperture: f/5.6
ISO: 320

140

The blossoms on these trees were so so lovely (at least at the end of May when this photo was taken they were).

Exposure time: 1/250 s
Aperture: f/5.6
ISO: 320

139

Due to laziness, there is now over a month gap between when some of these photos (like this one) were taken, and when they made it to the blog. It was the end of May when the lilacs started blossom. Oh such a lovely smell!

Exposure time: 1/250 s
Aperture: f/5.0
ISO: 320

138

Check out these crazy clouds I saw recently! They looked like a cartoon, like someone had just painted them in.

Exposure time: 1/25 s
Aperture: f/29.0
ISO: 320