... a few days ago megan and emily came over and helped me with a major floor washing and dusting and general tidying up ...
... tonight, longest of the year, thought i should do the same with my journal ... for those who are regulars on facebook many of these will be familiar, but for the majority of my friends and family this will be "first night" ..
... i'm just going to wander a bit, dealing individually with each photograph ...
... if for no other reason than it was getting in the way of my "creative process," i found it time to replace my macbook air ... moving up from a machine that is at least two cpu generations ancient, i wanted to get a computer with at least 16GB of RAM and running an 8th gen/i7 processor ... due to apple inc.'s exorbitant price structure, i decided to save well over $1,000 and purchase a dell ... right, windows 10, almost lost a few friends with that ... i think they finally accepted that i do, indeed, know what i'm doing when it comes to digital technology ...
... this machine is fast ... fast-fast-fast ... in the past few weeks i've been putting it to the test while i experimented with new techniques and used software that i've never had a cpu quick enough to handle ...
... so, here we go ...
... this was taken in 2001 with my brand-new olympus e-10 ... 4 megapixels, wow ... still, it had a fabulous lens and for its time the viewfinder was first-class ... i revisited this image using aurora hdr and affinity photo, and i was quite pleased with how much more i could accomplish with the original file ... museum of art, new york city, by the way ...
... from a wire bridge wanderabout ... seven layers, each rather painfully manipulated and then even more painfully blended with one another ...
... five frames, hdr merged in aurora hdr ... this spring we're going to take some measuring instruments and determine if the tops of the towers are askew or it's just an optical illusion ...
... two black & whites, also five-frame hdr merges ...
... robert, my favorite test subject ...
... megan and emily and i went for a stroll along the kennebec ... one of them, i'm not sure which, called to me, "mister groleau, look at the shadows" ...
... playing in jixipix premium pack ...
... more fun ... i think that next spring i'm going to enjoy greatly trying to capture the essence of flower beings ...
... i snapped this image many years ago using a fancy 4/3rds "point and shoot" camera ... aurora hdr enable me to further explore the shadow details ...
... a new edge-contrast filter brought the leaf to the front of the frame ...
... car running to keep her warm, ma sat and enjoyed the point while i froze my fingers trying to honor the hardy rhode island winter surfers ...
... affinity photo allows for very precise color manipulation ...
... combining aurora hdr and affinity photo, a classic "zone system" image ...
... odd, never much caring for the original image other than accepting that it's a perfect "calendar shot, this interpretation pleases me ... it's a three-frame panorama to which i performed some very convoluted skewing and twisting to get the apparent perspective just right ... photoshop cs, plus six layers of jixipix play ...
... from a long time ago, taken with my often missed sigma 100-300 f/4 "super-duper" zoom ... aurora hdr helped me to find the tonal gradation i've never been able to achieve using just photoshop ...
... one of my all-time favorite shots ...
... the dell has a WXUGA display (super sharp compared to anything i've ever used) that makes working on an image such as this much easier on my eyes ... this is downtown belfast ...
... a self-portrait, one i've never been able to process to satisfaction ...
... another revisiting ... five frames hdr merged, then a lot of masking and perspective correction to bring it to "as i saw it"...
... just playing, i added the snowflakes ...
... some of beth's famous flowers ... i'm happy with this interpretation, but i've a ways to go with this before i'm going to pronounce it done ...
... last night, outside my window ... hand-held at 1/8th second, i.s.o. set to 6,400 ... in original the crows are pretty much indistinguishable, thank you very much aurora hdr ...
... either you'll understand or not, neither'll make much of a difference as to how much i enjoy finding pics such as this ...
... these, i believe, are from emotional center of my photography ...
... i take pictures and then share them ...
... you and i, together we see ...
... what great joy ...