Photo of the Month – August

Hi Folks:

One of the benefits of living where we do is that we’re frequent visitors to Victoria’s Beacon Hill Park. In addition to the many trees from all over the world, shrubs, perennials, ferns, etc. the park staff plant several thousand flowers every year. And we haven’t mentioned the wildlife, from dragonflies to black-tailed deer. It’s a wonderful place to visit, and the changes through the seasons are something to behold.

As usual we have two images for our photo of the month post, one from Marcia and one from Mike. Both were made with our cell phone cameras, and both were pushed around a bit in Lightroom. Continue Reading →

The ‘Orton Effect’ in Lightroom

Hi Folks:

As with many photographers, almost from the time I started making photographs I also began playing with them.  For negatives this involved darkroom work, with slide film I would try mounting two images in the same frame, but all of this became a lot easier when I got into digital processing.

In Lightroom 2 (I think), Adobe introduced the ‘negative clarity’ slider, and while it was fun to use on its own, one day I wondered what would happen if I made a virtual copy of an image, overexposed both the original and the VC slightly (dual mounting slides in the same frame holder made the overall image darker), and applied negative clarity to one, then combined them using the LR/Enfuse plugin.  The result was this: Continue Reading →