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This year I will be mostly... taking a photo every day, and posting it up here for you all to see and comment on if you feel inclined (please do). It's not an original idea, I stole it off a friend and many other people are doing the same as I speak, but I thought it seemed like a great idea to get used to my new toy, my Canon Eos 500D with Tamron 18-250mm Macro lens - my first digital SLR.

A lot of sites online talk about 'project 365' where people are encouraged to take a photo every day, but while their take on it is to create a personal history of the photographer, I wanted to make it a bit more abstract, more about the world around me. So this isn't meant to be a photo diary of my life, I am striving for each photo to be 'good' because of its artistic and technical merit, not because it's personal to me. Having said that personal subject matter will inevitably creep in as inspiration, but that's allowed, the book I'm reading claim that "every picture we take is merely a self-portrait of our inner psyche"!

I had a think of a couple of ideas for themes and settled on 'moods'. Then I was hit by indecision as to what to do if I take a photo I like and want to upload as my daily snap, but it doesn't fit the theme. So I have decided that the theme is just for inspiration rather than as a criteria, the photos can be of anything. That way I get the most flexibility of what to upload, and still have a muse.

While I'll be taking photos every day, I'll only upload them every few days, so keep checking back. I'm not anticipating the photos to be groundbreaking (at least not to start with!), the whole point is to improve so I won't be great initially. But I'll still try my best which will hopefully keep it interesting. Please feel free to add whatever comments you like (hopefully constructive!) as that will help me as much as the process of actually taking a photo a day, I will endeavour to reply to them all.

For my trip reports blog see http://fidgetsadventures.blogspot.com


Thursday 16 June 2011

Tuesday 14th June 2011

These plants were backlit by the golden light this evening, as I enjoyed a stroll round Consall woods. As a bit of a poll to satisfy an editing pondering I've been having of late, I'd be interested whether people prefer the one with less contrast, or the second one with greater contrast (I won't say at present which was more representative).
























168mm, 1/100s, f/5.6, ISO 200
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4 comments:

  1. Anni16 June 2011 at 09:07

    I prefer the one on the right :o)

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  2. Dan Lane16 June 2011 at 15:14

    I prefer the one on the right too, though my guess would be that left is more representative...

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  3. Victim of Mathematics2 July 2011 at 23:42

    I much prefer the one on the left. The one on the right looks a bit unnatural.

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  4. Sarah Clough3 July 2011 at 00:08

    Cheers. I edited a different picture in a similar way today and with it being a more complex photo (more in it), I realised the version with the stronger contrast is quite unnatural, like you say. Less is more!

    The reason I asked is because lately I've been looking at various photographs on the web that are quite soft in terms of colour and light that look really lovely, and realised that maybe I over-process mine in terms of contrast and definition. I did a little automatic adjustment in raw on this photo as I usually do to spread the histogram out, then in photoshop I threw in a levels layer and changed the blending mode to 'overlay', also a common edit for me to make. I dragged the opacity quite a long way down to minimise the effect, to 20% and liked the way it looked - that is the paler of the two photos here, more subtle. If I put the opacity any higher it looked wrong, but at 80% suddenly the vividness of the light round the edge of the flower jumped out, so I saved it as a different version. However, I do feel this makes the background rather distracting, as it's greener and bolder. The background grass wasn't that green in reality.

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