Picture Post, Sunday September 30, 2007

(Y'all will have to enlarge these photos to get a good view so that you can see what I talk about in the text below.)

Straight photo of afternoon sun and clouds over the Indian River Lagoon, from the Melbourne Causeway, Melbourne, Florida.

Same exact photo as just above, after using the Orton process on it.

Straight photo of the Indian River Lagoon as seen from Rykman Park in Melbourne Beach, Florida.

Same exact photo as just above, after using the Orton process on it.

Orton process done on a photo of one of Lovely Wife's ixora plants.

The Orton process is a photography technique created by photographer Michael Orton.

He would use 35mm slide film, camera set on a tripod to allow several identical scenes to be photographed, and take, say, two photos of the same scene, both overexposed (too bright), one in sharp focus, and one way out of focus as to be pretty blurry.

After processing, he would take the two slide images, sandwich them on top of one another and make a print.

The sharp one, juxtaposed with the blurry one, ends up creating a gorgeous, glowing, soft quality in the resulting photo.

With the magic of digital editing via Photoshop Elements, I've finally, after much trial and (mostly) error over the past year to try to replicate this look in digital photos, come pretty darn close.

Here are two photos of the Indian River Lagoon, here in this area, with the Orton process look worked on them.

I have put the straight photo and the Orton process version of each on here.

The final photo, of some of Lovely Wife's ixora, has the Orton process worked on it as well.

This seems to have a much more pleasing and dramatic effect on photos with lots of sunlight in them. The ixora photo looks really nice, but it doesn't knock my socks off like the first two.

Which do you like best?

I'm totally loving the second one in the post, with the orangey sky and the Orton process' dreamy addition to it.

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I posted a new panorama today over at John's Daily Digital Images if you want to go over there and take a gander at it.

Picture Post, Sunday June 24, 2007

Howdy folks. I was going through some photos that I've taken lately and ended up with several evening photos, that although not spectacular, I thought I would post them.

I've lived in several southern U.S. states, and they all had appeal for different reasons. Lovely Wife and I tried to take advantage of the places we lived because we have moved so many times in our marriage that we never knew where we might be in another couple of years. I'd hate to look back and say, "Boy, I sure wish we had done such and such while we lived in Wherever."

Of course, most of the things we have done are the cheap things. For most of our marriage, until I went back to school, earned my engineering degree and moved to Palm Bay for my first, and thus far, only job as an engineer, we were pretty much broke.

We went to public parks with the kids, zoos and things of that sort when the girls were little, and so on.

Growing up, I was one of those young people who didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, and I didn't know where, I just knew that I wanted out of Monroe, Louisiana.

For the record, there is absolutely nothing wrong with Monroe. I'm just one of those people who knew I wanted out of there. Monroe has as good a bunch of people there as anywhere else in the world. I'm not saying something about Monroe when I say I wanted out; I'm saying something ABOUT ME.

I've always loved the beach and when I had my degree in hand one of the job offers I had was here in Melbourne / Palm Bay, Florida.

Now, having said all of that, one of the special things about this area is the water. I cannot tell you what it still does to me after ten years of living and working here to come to a point while driving where I can see either the Indian River Lagoon or the Atlantic Ocean. My heart leaps a little bit, even after all of this time.

So the first four of today's pics are a few afternoon shots that I've taken in the last week or two, that are a good representation of what evenings are like here literally 300 days or so every year. It's beautiful so many evenings and causes in me sensations I can't really describe to you.

Without further ado:





This final one is a bit different. I had taken this shot and when I pulled it up on the computer I realized why. To me, the street light over part of the Melbourne Causeway out to the ocean looked like those laser beam, eye thingies on the space ships in the original The War of the Worlds movie from the fifties. Zzzzt!

Y'all be particular now, hear?

Picture Post, Sunday May 13, 2007

This past Tuesday, I wrote a post about, and also included some photos of a Soviet made Zorki-4 camera I bought off ebay.

The seller said the camera worked fine, and she also had a perfect 100% positive feedback on over 200 transactions, so I took a chance, and hoped to get a decent working camera that I could play around with for cheap. When I received it (shipped from Ukraine), the camera seemed to be in great shape, so after checking out it's functionality, I loaded some film.

Todays pictures were on the first roll of 35mm print film that I put through this camera. Warning, I wasn't going for artistic merit in these. I was just pointing and firing away at different types of scenes and lighting to check it out at different settings. It was the first time for me to use Kodak UC 400 film, Ultra Color. The film was a bit too grainy, and the colors almost too intense, but overall, I was pleased with how good the camera performed.

This first one, I hooked up an old flash to the camera to check out the flash sychronization. It worked better than I had hoped, the old, early 60s flash and this late 60s camera. That's Angel on the left and Lilly on the right. They were both bummed because I was leaving for work, hence the last ditch, pitiful look to try to guilt trip me into staying home.
Some of Lovely Wife's flowers right outside our front door.This one is the gate to our back yard, on one side of the house. I wanted to get both shadow and bright sun.This one was taken at Ballard Park in Melbourne, Florida. This park is only about five minutes from where I work and I wandered around there the other day during my lunch period.This shot was as I was walking along the creek, following these two snowy egrets. They stayed a careful distance from me, but I like this shot anyway.This final one was on a different day last week at lunch. It's the Atlantic ocean, but it had become really overcast because of the tropical storm that was northeast of us.

Betty Boop And The Prowler

Today's forecast: Intense lumbar back pain with flashes of shooting pain down the left leg.

Y'all are gettin' pictures...

Picture Post, Sunday January 28, 2007

A little piece of Heaven.

There is an AWESOME used bookstore in downtown Melbourne, Florida called One The Shelf.

Here are a few pictures from our last visit to the store. The place has boxes of books that he has bought from folks, but hasn't shelved yet. These boxes are in the aisles and corners of the store; you have to really watch your step walking around in here.

They have comics and just about any category of book you would care to look for.


This next one is all the stuff jam packed behind the register right inside the front door.
Autographed by Pat Boone! Who knows what other treasures you might find?


This one makes you want to dig into those boxes.
This is one of those situations where digital cameras provide a little magic. When I stepped into the store, the first thing I did was to adjust the white balance of the camera to the "fluorescent" setting. I cranked up the ISO to 800, and took the pictures here without a flash.

I dearly love slide film and the way it looks, the colors and everything, but my dSLR is still finding new ways to win my heart.