2022

Another year, another year of Ginkgos and leaves. I never cease to be amazed at the beauty of these ancient leaves with their wonderful color, vein pattern, and shape. There is no more classic leaf shape to me than these. I guess because I’ve lived in this house for 35 years and I have two huge, female trees that drop the stinky fruits. This year was a very, very dry year of fruits, thank goodness. Last year we have many, many thousands. This year just a few hundred. I just went outside two days in a row and and took […]

Was in the Finger Lakes, NY district over Columbus Day and got lots of neat photos. This black-and-white was a convert of a color photo also shown. I didn’t like the background, but the coincidence of the hoops was more important than the background, so that dictated by photo. I also loved the aqua-green hoops, but maybe it looks better in B&W, which highlights the geometric aspect of the composition vs. the color one. Show with my Olympus E-M1, as usual.

Took a bunch of photos of wine grapes at the Three Brothers Winery in Seneca Falls, NY. I thought the backlighting was especially lovely with the backlit colors. I did a bunch of work on the original file with Lr for iPad to darken distracting elements. The second image has been reworked through TangeledFX, one of my favorite iPad artistic tools. I often layer the original and TangeledFX images together with Ps, but not with this one, were I put the original edited version along with the TFX version. Both are nice, IMO.

I know this is becoming a cliche, but it is amazing what the iPhone can do, especially the new iPhone14. These were taken about 30 min past sunset, handheld. The EXIF data says 1/5 sec at f/1.8. The ISO says <mixed>, whatever that is. It was quite dim here, distantly lit by a street lamp. I’m surprised at the clarity, the color richness, and the sharpness. It’s as “they” say, the best camera is the one you have with you. This was also shot in Apple Pro Raw 48bit, so it benefits from that, although I just opened the .HEIC

Went to Florida a couple of weeks ago and the palm trees always interest me with their super-textured bark, overlapping scale-like thingees and how they render. Using my Olympus E-M1.2, I took a bunch of photos. Then the post processing. One was particularly photogenic, so I brought it into Lightroom for iPad and use Black-and-White mode, tweaking the color sliders to get the contrast that I wanted. Then I ran it through Color Grading, which has rapidly become my goto for processing B&W. Many, many years ago in the 80’s I used to tone BW prints with either Selenium or