Friday, December 28, 2012

Moon Shot



In a previous post I discuss techniques for "Shooting The Moon". Since then I have established a rather large collection of Moon Shots showing it in various phases. So you may ask why take all these pictures. One answer is the old "Because I can". The better answer is because I might have a use for them some day.

Enter the picture above. This was a nice shot of a boat leaving the harbor at nightfall and would stand on it's own. But just for the fun of it (isn't that what this is all about anyway?) I added a moon to the picture. I did this in Photoshop Elements and how I did it is for another post.

So some people say this is not really a picture. That can be a full discussion as well. I will say I used this trick in my darkroom back in the 60's. Then I had many moon pictures that I could burn in to anything I wanted as well. Besides some may say we are creating art and if this was a painting we could add anything we wanted. Anyway you look at it, it's still a nice picture.

So have you done anything like this?


Thursday, December 27, 2012

Elements 11


The Christmas rush is over so it is time to get back to posting. What better way to get started again then by looking back at the fun we had on Christmas Day.

First things first, I received Photoshop Elements 11 as a Christmas gift from my daughter. Naturally I needed to try it out as soon as I could. Of course I feel that there is no better way to learn than by trial and error so why spend time reading the book when I can jump right in. To do that I first needed to pick a photo that I could work with and enhance in some way. A photo I had taken of my grandson bowling in the hallway on Christmas Day seemed to fit the bill perfectly. But what could I do with it?

After looking through some of the examples in Photoshop, I decided that the "Out of Bounds" effect looked like something that would be fun to work with and hopefully produce a nice result. Now my next question was how does this work? Remember I didn't read any of the book that my daughter also gave me. Luckily for me Adobe has some good tutorials online and this effect was among them. So after my third attempt I achieved the results you see here.

The moral to this story is very simple. Don't let something you have never done before stop you from trying. Just dive in and see what happens. Hopefully you agree that I did obtain a decent result.