I went back to the drawing board in GIMP to try to improve my results on the moon photo I wrote about here and here is the result.

I used the same layers as in the previous post but this time, instead of adjusting the transparency of the entire top layer, I added an alpha channel, selected the black sky and made just the sky transparent.

If you look closely, there are still a few issues I need to work through, the main one being I need practice making accurate selections. I'm sure there's some kind of easy way to do this but I don't know what it is yet. As a result, the outer edge of my moon is kind of funky looking, but it's good to know I'm moving in the right direction. I think.

Read more »

Shasta is not what you would call a bold and independent dog. She loves to go to the dog park and play with the other dogs, but she likes to stay close to Mom and Dad at the same time. These two shots are typical...she runs ahead, then stops to check that we're still coming and waits for us to catch up. When I'm lagging behind, she'll even run part way back to check on me, before sprinting ahead of my husband again.

Read more »

We had some unusual March snow earlier this week. I love the snow and, sadly, we don't get all that much of it around here, so when we do, I tend to take a lot of photos. One thing that made this week's snow even more unusual is that it snowed all morning with temps hovering just over 32 degrees, then cleared up late in the afternoon. The setting sun combined with the melting snow set the many trees in my yard and neighborhood to glittering. I took many, many photos and only a few even come close to looking as amazing as it was in real life.

And a couple of my less successful shots. My main mistake here was trying to take the photos from too far away. I should have walked right out there instead of using my 55-300 mm lens, fully zoomed in, but - I'll be honest - the glittering, dripping trees were beautiful, but that didn't mean I wanted to, you know, walk under them.

I saw this blog post a few weeks ago about a zoom lens being a crutch. I need to acquire some better lenses and occasionally venture out without my crutch.

Read more »

Hah! Made you look!

Western Hemlock silhouetted against the moon.

The next two photographs are two different versions of the same shot. The top one was save as a jpeg by the camera. The bottom was converted to a jpeg from the camera's RAW format. It's interesting to note that for this shot, the RAW file produced a much darker image than the jpeg, but for this one, the RAW image is much lighter.

Read more »

I love this shot of my girl. Look at that sweet face...mere mortals are powerless to resist!

Read more »

I've been working on getting an interesting shot of the moon for weeks. Seeing as we're in the middle of the rainy season in the Pacific Northwest, this is no small feat, but tonight I finally have something to share.

Here is my final image.

I wish I could say I just pointed my camera at the sky and used some mad camera skillz to get this shot but, sadly, that's not exactly what happened.

This is my original shot. The shutter speed on this was 1/50 second. It's not bad, but the moon lacks detail and the trees don't stand out from the sky.

I opened my original in Picasa and cranked up the brightness to make the trees pop. Then I opened it in GIMP.

Then I opened this in GIMP as a layer. This is the same shot as my original, but from the RAW file. As you can see, it's much darker than the jpeg. Then I set the opacity of the layer to around 35%...transparent enough to see the silhouetted trees in the base layer, but opaque enough to add some detail to the moon.

Then I flattened the image and voila! There you have it!

This was the easiest and fastest way I could think of to get an acceptable result, given that it was the first time I've used the software. I need to keep working on it so I can have more definition on the moon and more contrast between the branches and the sky.

Read more »

I snagged a couple of good shots yesterday while Shasta was outside playing with Daddy. My Nikon was set to Action Scene mode so, yeah, nothing fancy on my part.

Unedited:

Read more »