Picture Post, Sunday October 28, 2007

In the past month or so I have posted some panoramic shots. I have been going back as I felt the desire to the highest quality images that make up each panorama, and have been creating new ones with these higher quality images. The one's I posted originally were made with low resolution JPEGs, and while they looked good, I wanted to use the RAW images and recreate them so that I would have the best quality of these panoramas that I could get.

Here's another one. This is at Ocean Park in Melbourne Beach, Florida. It's one of the nicer beach parks around here, yet one of the closest ones from our home. We can be on this beach in about 20 minutes from our house. It's not an exciting photo, no killer sunrise or anything, but I wanted it to look like it does when we go there for a day on the sand. Lovely Wife has picked me up from work many a lunch time and we came here to eat. They have a small pavilion above the beach with a great view. It was a nice, hot day when I took this (these) photo, kinda late in the afternoon, but still, see how few people were on this beach?

Since the above panorama was taken in the city of Melbourne Beach, Florida, I thought I'd throw in a couple of other Melbourne Beach images. This one is the pier that has been the star of many of the photos I've posted on here.

Here's another in Melbourne Beach. The street in this photo curves 90degrees to the left just past the blue building and goes striaght east for about a mile and takes you right into Ocean Park where the panorama above was taken. It's an easy walk and a beautiful little town out there.

This final shot was taken in a park in Melbourne, Florida called Erna Nixon Park. It's just a few miles from where I work and have gone there and walked on the boardwalk that winds through the park. It's a nature park, showing natural Florida, not a swings and slides kind of park. These palm trees crossing one another caught my eye.


Have a great Sunday, folks!

Picture Post, Sunday October 7, 2007

Yeah, it's another panorama, but I made this one from the highest quality versions of the photos that were assembled to make it. My previous attempts, the ones I've put on here lately were from lower quality JPEGs just to see how the panoramas would come out.

I've really liked them and am going back and starting to remake them, using the best quality versions of the photos.

This one is from one of our favorite spots to watch sunsets, so this one represents many hours of Lovely Wife at this park absorbing this view.

Have you ever seen an entire downtown in one building? Then you'll see that very thing in the next picture. Melbourne Beach, Florida has the Fire Department, the Town Hall, and the Police Department all located in one convenient and stylish building. Spiffy, eh?

Looking down a street in Melbourne Beach toward the Indian River Lagoon and the evening sky. If you compare that big cloud formation with the clouds in the panoramic photo above, you'll see that these photos were taken a few minutes apart from each other.

This massive and beautiful tree is in front of a wellness center. I think this is a type of mimosa, one of my favorite trees. I love the two different shades of leaves this tree has.

This plant was growing in this eye-level crook between branches of the mimosa tree in the above photo.

Have a great Sunday, folks!

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.

Wordy Wednesday

I don't do Wordless Wednesday. I feel compelled to have words with my photos. They mean so much more when there's even just a little bit of context.

These were taken when I was on a photo excursion this past Saturday. They are both photos of the Indian River Lagoon.

One of the most beautiful things on earth to me is sunlight glinting on the little ripples in water. This was a magical, timeless looking scene of a public pier out into the Indian River Lagoon.

This second one was taken from beside the Melbourne Causeway, our closest bridge to the barrier island and the Atlantic Ocean. This is looking back toward the mainland. I loved the rays of the sun in this one.