Valfal's photos

Saturday Self-Challenge: Photograph the view out your window and use your window as a frame for the picture A view to my flower garden (being overrun by a large pumpkin plant from last year's Halloween pumpkin, lol) This challenge was much harder than I thought it would be. First of all, I quickly realized my windows were not the best in the world to attempt this challenge on, and I didn't have much in the way of time to search for anything more interesting. But the biggest problem to overcome was in balancing the exposure between the bright sunny exterior and darker interior. As you can see, I did not entirely succeed. After hours of unsuccessful attempts to take photos of my living room picture window yesterday (see notes) and spending most of last night processing (attempts to remove a glare on the window failed), I gave up and decided on the next best window in the house...which just happened to be my storm door. I was so frustrated, I didn't even try to balance lighting between outside and inside in this picture. At least the sun illuminated enough of the interior to catch a decent shot of my cat. I just wanted an image that was somewhat interesting. If I only knew the exposure setting my eyes use!

Antique cobalt glass medicine bottles. Have a nice weekend, everyone! :-)

Saturday Self-Challenge: Try to show "redness" in black and white This was quite a challenging topic to tackle; how do you show a color in black and white? There were several ways to approach this. I tried color filters and wound up using the "super black and white" feature on PicMonkey modified. In the notes I have the color version of this image and a black and white photo that I used the light blue filter in PicMonkey's B&W settiing, which makes the image look amazingly different. All in all a very interesting challenge; I hope that I successfully conveyed the color red in the image above. ;-)

My grandson Logan sitting on the sofa looking at television with his grandpa. I was intrigued by how the light hit his face. In the note is a photo of his grandpa (my husband) that I captured at the same time as the image above.

Macro Mondays 2.0: Hairs A shaving brush made of badger hair. More photos in the notes.

Saturday Self-Challenge: Zoom Burst This week I learned a lot about the relationship between shutter speed, f-stop and ISO! After experimenting with settings and figuring out how to stabilize the camera while "zooming" (I put the camera on a stable surface rather than use a tripod), I took an image I thought acceptable enough to post.This photo was snapped in my living room using a 1 second exposure at f/16 and ISO 100. Since the natural lighting was throwing shadows in the wrong places, I employed the use of fill flash (learned from the challenge of two weeks ago) to brighten the subject a little. I thought it would be fun to use zoom burst to create the illusion of movement by my little Lego man and the monster robot "chasing" him. ;-)

Macro Mondays 2.0: Prickly A closeup of my "Crown of Thorns" plant.

Saturday Self-Challenge: Silhouettes A traditional Native-American Wedding vase. One spout represents the husband, the other the wife.The looped handle represents the unity achieved with marriage.

A beautiful pink anemone seen at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, PA USA.

Macro Mondays 2.0: Hole(s) Just having a little fun with the Legos. :-))

Saturday Self-Challenge: "Fill Flash" It has been a very busy week for me, so I could not practice this technique as well as I wanted to. But I had a small bit of time to try it on my garden statue. This is what snapping the photo with 1/32 flash looks like. I snapped the image in the note using the same manual settings as this one but no flash.

This is what my statue image looked like without use of flash. Made for the Saturday Self-Challenge group.

Macro Mondays 2.0: Berries of any kind A tiny wild strawberry growing among the grass and weeds near my garden. Wishing everyone a great week ahead! :-)

My husband with our first grandchild enjoying the beach at the Outer Banks, NC. ten years ago. That smiling grandchild is now 11 years old and still smiling.

Saturday Self-Challenge: Anything Made of Glass Several old bottles from my collection. I used selective coloring to focus on the vibrant color of the glass.

A candid shot of my cat, Rusty.

Macro Monday 2.0: Rainbow Refracted light on a DVD.