Alexandru - expert at finding dead things -.-

This post is by my absolutely amazing boyfriend :D

Since I was little I have always had this talent for finding dead things. Or just killing things. When I was little, at my great-grandparents, I was asked to get an egg for lunch from the chicken's nest, and when I was leaving I dropped the egg. I decided to leave it there and take another one. A couple of weeks later, I saw my great-grandparents rearing the chick from the egg that was dropped. Yes, the egg cracked.

But, we kept it in the warmth and it grew and survived and, a month later, became my dinner. Yum yum!

Another example. We (meaning me, my girlfriend and some other people) were doing our Silver Duke of Edinburgh Practice Expedition, when I found a entire dead lamb's skeleton - about three feet above our heads in a tree. Just hanging there. Here's a pic if you don't believe me:

Let's see...
- A dead fish floating in the Kennet and Avon Canal, which again nobody else noticed besides me. Unfortunately I don't have a picture, because my little angel Hannah flatly refused to take one. I wanted her to take one of me having it in my hands, as if I'd caught it myself, which I did, but, being dead, it wasn't much of a challenge! Also, I wanted to feed it to my friends, but my little angel Hannah stopped me with "the look" - you know, the kind your mother gives you when you're in deep, deep trouble.
- What's next? Roadkill. And lots of it. A smashed up fox, deers, cats, dogs, birds, hedgehogs... so many that I've lost count of them.
- I have also recently spotted a dead, decomposing mouse on the pavement. I was surprised that nobody got rid of it until it was completely decayed. And, on the way to see my little angel Hannah, I found a dead bird - well, chick, it was still in it's shattered egg. It's eyes were big!!!


I can also spot nice things. Bunnies, fishies, rainbows, purple and rainbow-coloured butterflies, that nobody else seem to see. They only see the dead things when I point them out, never the live ones.

The end :)

P.S: If you have found a disgusting dead thing, leave a comment!!

"Just another flower in a pot." >>> Don't forget the details!!

Was just looking through some of my past photographs from numerous trips to Cotswold Wildlife Park and Snelsmore and Greenham commons, and I couldn't help but notice that some of the best shots were those which were of just a few details, not the entire subject (for example, a leaf rather than the whole tree). And so, I thought I'd just share a few of these with y'all and say why I think they're better than a full shot might have been :) there's also a few where I'll show you how details can add interest to a set of images.

Quite a long post this one :L so, as always, thanks for reading my tiresome ramblings!! 

 OK, so the mug is from a Father's Day many a year ago - I just zoomed in pretty close and rested the camera on the table to get this result. I used the same technique with the wellies. Then I just touched up the colour with "Levels" and "Curves", two pretty (in my opinion) useful Photoshop tools which adjust white/black areas and the image's contrast respectively.

 On my right, a close-up of a leaf from some type of palm, on my left... well, obviously shattered glass, actually this was from when my dad decided to smash a brand-new French window (the lawnmower threw a stone at it while he was cutting the grass - :L). Anyway, again these are just simple close-ups, with very little editing done - I upped the contrast on the glass to highlight all the lovely lines in it and made the leaf more vibrant :). I think the yellow speckling on the leaves looks really good, something that would have been lost if I'd shot the whole leaf. Also, the paving behind the glass gives a nice little bit of background variation - again, something I would have lost with a wider shot.

 Here, I just stuffed my favourite handbag with all the pencils and pens I could find and took a few snaps. This was actually for one of my GCSE projects and I needed something a little unconventional - my other idea was putting my teddy in the dishwasher and flowers in my saxophone :L. This needed very little just tweaking the colours and contrast. I cannot remember where I took the right image, but I thought the stone mini totem-poles were rather amusing. A close-up shot adds detail here - to fit them all in would require quite a distance and you wouldn't be able to pick out the different expressions as well.

 Another GCSE project here. Borrowed my mother's vast collection of Prinknash Pottery and arranged them. The left shows pots which are the same - by zoming in this detail can be shown less obviously which in many cases is more interesting. Anyhow, one of them had £££ (ok, 1p, 2p and 5p coins) in it, so the right is my results! I think it's better when photographing things like money to be able to see the different values - easy solution? Zoom in!!!!

The swirly black ridges (top left) are shot through glass at the Natural History Museum in London, it's a coal formation. Pretty cool! Shooting through glass is often troublesome because of reflections, lights, fingerprints etc etc. Getting as close to the glass as possible is a good way to avoid much of these problems, as is avoiding flash wherever possible. I like the stark contrast here - I made it black and white as it was slightly brownish and I wanted to enhance the contrast as much as I could. Top right and bottom left are the parts of flowers that hang over the edges of the pot - this can sometimes work as you see what it is but avoid the boring just-another-flower-in-a-pot type picture, so your work is more original - always a plus!! As I mentioned above, one of my ideas for my GCSE project was putting flowers n my saxophone - and here is one of the images!! The flowers dominate and create a really colourful image, but you can still see the saxophone so it's nice and quirky once you work out what it is :) it's not my best, but there you go. You can't always be perfect!. For these three I just made it a bit brighter and a tad more saturated so the colours stood out but weren't glaring. Another thing about close-ups - the camera will often automatically focus on the details, or you can manually adjust them with the depth of field and macro settings. This gives your image a clear subject and also can blur out any unwantd background, i.e. making a stray piece of litter unrecognisable.

Three guesses what this is. Some of my friends suggested scaffolding, a crane, and one of those geo-mag thingies. All wrong. It's the Eiffel Tower. If you want to make a pic more abstract, zooming in until it's almost impossible to tell what it is is one way around it. However, I wouldn't do it to the point where it is completely non-discernible (as some of my friends found this one) because you lose the point. I didn't edit this one but I think it doesn't need much anyway to be honest.

Sorry for boring you all to death with this :L any ideas for a photo-shoot project? The weather's warming up enough now for me to go out without gloves on so let's have your suggestions!!

Ahh, a little trip down memory lane :) and some editing along the way!

All these pics were taken by my dad when I was around 6 or 7 years old... obviously I have no idea what digital camera he used as it was 9 or 10 years ago now but its a good start for simple editing. Here goes!

Ok so this first one is me looking around a tree in my grandparent's garden - I can't remember why I'm looking scared here. To edit this, first I touched up the brightness and contrast to make it a bit less dull. I then ran a burn tool brush over my hair (set at a low-exposure and mainly targeting the shadows) to bring out the redness of it (the bottom picture - the finished one - shows the true natural colour of my hair lol).

I also burned the tree (same setting) to bring out the green more and make the variation of tones slightly more prominent.

Before

After

Here, I can only assume my mum's camera was used, as my twin sis (on the sofa - and yes, we look different) is holding Dad's. Again, I have no idea what make the camera used was, but the resolution's fairly low. It's easier to crop images when the resolution's higher as you have more pixels to play with - as you may be able to see, this low-resolution shot has gone fairly pixelly. The original image is quite a bit wider so I cropped it to focus on us.

Original 

Edited

So, the (very bad) editing. Again, brightness and contrast at first, then I used the variations tool to lower the redness a bit. I then burned my hair darker and used the paint tool (red, with a very low opacity) to bring the colour of it back, which had been lost in the process.

Anyways, all the editing I used here was done on Adobe Photoshop CS4, which I use for all my images. It's pretty easy to use and is (in my opinion) very good!! Main things I have used here:

 - burn tool to make things darker, concentrating on specifics like highlights or shadows;

 - brightness and contrast (this, along with levels and curves in Photoshop, provide basic editing and is often

   all that is needed to improve an image);

 - crop, which gets rid of unwanted background (but can make a picture pixelly - make sure the image has as

   high a resolution as possible);

 - paint, which when used at a low opacity can enhance a colour;

 - variations (this adds extra blue/cyan/red/green/yellow/magenta to the whole of the image, and you can set it  

   to different strengths).

The next post will contain images I actually took myself :P

Intro!

Well, I'm pretty interested in photography as a hobby - I take my camera most places with me. I took it for an extra GCSE (results come out in August... A* please, Mr. Examiner!!) and that's when I really started to get into it. I have a little, fairly simple digital camera and also a bigger, better one - a Lumix Coolpix, it's quite good for most things.

Anyway, thought I'd just upload a few every now and then, with some tips and things and say a bit about how I edited them, because I want to share my love of photography with y'all. I'm completely new to all this blogging lark so bear with me please!!

:) Here's me... gardening :L