Motion

This month's Gardening Gone Wild photo contest is about capturing motion in a photo. In other words, it's something that I generally consider a 'bad' photo. Of course that's not to say that I don't love it when other people do it, but when I do it I think it doesn't look very good. But then, I probably am just harder on myself than I am on others. And I always look at a photo I've taken and think "motion blur (bad)" as opposed to "motion blur (cool)". The best motion blur photos I think I've ever taken were done unintentionally: I somehow managed to get my point and shoot camera to create these awesome blur photos when I was in New Orleans; I have never been able to get it to do that since. For this project, I took a crap load of photos, but never got one that I really absolutely love, but I think some of it is the angles that I had to use and what have you (I mean who really wants to see a downspout on my house?)

I took a trees in the breeze photo which I like, but there's very little motion in it:



In the end I ended up deciding that one of the many feather grass photos best showed motion:


I still don't like how grainy it looks in the small photo - much better at the embiggened size...

Rock Rose

I had fun playing with GIMP today. Here is the base image::

Camera: Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi
Exposure: 1/200
Aperture: 6.64 EV (f/10)
ISO: 400
Flash: No
Metering: Pattern
Exposure Program: Normal (green square I think)
Focal Length: 70.0mm
Post Processing: Levels (manual), Brightness (-5), Contrast (+10), Unsharp Mask.

And here is after cropping (with saturation turned down some):


And here's where it got out of control and I started using some auto option filters in GIMP. I call this one "Cat" since it's similar to one of the filters that Cat at the Whimsical Gardener uses. Of course, hers turn out much better, and have more noise in them (thus making them look even cooler, naturally).



And here's a Mandelbrot filter (named after Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractal geometry). I call this one "Philip" since it looks like something that Philip at East Side Patch would play with (but of course, again, he would do a much better job than I would).

On the Road Again

I never really realized just how many photos of gardens or being in gardens I take when I'm on the road, so to speak.

Sunflowers and with church in background. Straubing, Germany

On our honeymoon, I took photos of gardens in each of the countries we visited (Switzerland, Germany and Austria, albeit the Austria photo is of a hedgehog in the garden bed), and this was before I was a garden blogger or had even thought about starting a garden blog.

Flower garden in Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland

Though to be fair, I only took the picture of the flowers in Lauterbrunnen because it had rained the ENTIRE time we were in Switzerland except for the last day and passing these flowers cheered me immensely. We, of course, had decided to camp the whole time. But it does give us something to talk about every year on our anniversary - the fact that it flooded in the camp ground we stayed at, and because of the flooding no one could get in or out of the town, and then the power went out. And we were in a tiny backpacking tent, with no form of entertainment in the town except for walking from one end of town to the other. Ah, the memories. (sorry for the in-depth honeymoon trip, but our 5-year anniversary is today, so it's the perfect time to wax nostalgic and go through all of our honeymoon and/or wedding photos)

But I digress.

Back in 2008, when Shawn had to go on a recruitment trip for his at-the-time employer to our alma mater, I decided to tag along. There aren't many places prettier than the CU campus in early October (in my opinion, but then, I may be biased). I spent my days hanging out at Varsity Pond taking pictures and counting turtles.

Varsity Pond, University of Colorado at Boulder Campus, Boulder, Colorado.

And just on the other side of this pond, in one of the flower beds, I found this, my entry for the August Gardening Gone Wild Picture This photo contest:

Gardening Gone Wild October Photo Contest.

Heads up everyone: Gardening Gone Wild's photo competition for October is one that you can start on now--it's all about creating a photo by putting things on your scanner bed and then scanning them to make a picture. YEAH...they explain it much better on their website here: http://www.gardeninggonewild.com/?p=12809

Gardening Gone Wild Photo Contest

A few months ago (heck, it may have been last month), the GGW photo contest theme was "Green," and I was going to enter a photo. I ended up not doing so because the photo I was going to submit wasn't 'perfect' in my mind (for those of you interested in knowing what it was, it was the Artemisia plant photo from April 8, 2010).

And of course no photo ever is perfect (or if it is, it's very rare indeed). Now then, choosing a FAVORITE photo on the other hand is much easier, though still difficult because it depends on what mood I'm in. Some of my favorites in the past have been the anole, spider web, and the double butterfly photos, along with countless flower photos. And those are just the "garden" photos.

As I decided I should finally enter the contest, and it doesn't require me to go out looking for a subject to photograph, I've decided on a flower photo (since the website is Gardening Gone Wild and they do ask that the photo be plant or garden related). I've already posted this picture before, but because it needs to be around 500 pixels on the long edge, it means I had to resize it specifically for the contest.