Showcasing the beauty of Mother Nature
Here are a few images of red-billed quelea murmurations that I hadn’t finished editing when I was doing my month of posts on birds.
I was a little unsure of converting these all to black and white, because they had beautiful sunset colours; but stripping it back does change the focus and impression. What do you think?
Wishing everyone a fantastic week ahead!
Today is World Rhino Day, so I decided to combine that with my photo art project for the month, and edit some of the rhino images I took on my last trip.
I won’t go on and on about the plight of the rhino, and of the greed, arrogance and ignorance of humans that has fuelled their decline and cluttered news feeds with horrifying photos of poaching. Other people can do that far better than I.
I simply want to live in a world where rhinos can live in peace. And I will hold that thought in my mind and in my heart, and hope that it becomes a reality.
As with all the other posts in this series, these images were created from photos I took, modified primarily using Topaz Studio to create these effects.
As much as I had hoped that my photo art topic would allow me to get comfortable with Topaz Studio version 2, I haven’t actually even tried it yet. Fingers crossed that this week coming up I can make some time to a watch a tutorial or two and get familiar with the program operation, but for now, I have stuck with the original version, and I am really happy with the results of this weeks experiments.
I decided to focus on birds this week, and played around with two basic combinations of software. The sunbird and hornbill were edited primarily using the Topaz AI Remix module, while the rest were done with Impression (along with the usual basic edits to start for tone, cropping, etc.).
Do you have a favourite this week?
I hope you enjoy, and wishing you a great week ahead.
Like impala, vervet monkeys can sometimes be seen so frequently from camp and when out on game drives that you stop paying attention to them, or taking the time to take photos of them. The alarm calls of the vervet monkeys can sometimes lead to predator sightings, so they are definitely an animal worth paying attention to out in the bush. They are interesting and inquisitive animals, and can often be seen up in the trees near camp buffet tables, trying to work out the best way to steal a muffin.
None of the vervet monkeys in the photos below were up to any such mischief (though I have seen it happen many times). These were from two different troops that we stopped to spend time with while out on game drives in May.
I’m focusing on photo art this month, and decided to start things off focusing on giraffes. The easily recognizable shape of a giraffe meant that no matter how far I took the editing, the shape of the animal would still be recognizable as a giraffe.
Since I don’t have any natural talents in drawing and painting, creating these painterly interpretations from the photographs that I take is my opportunity to set aside the need to keep an image looking realistic, and instead focus on what the image is saying to me.
I hope you like my selections for the week; check back next Sunday to see the next instalment.
Today I wanted to share a few of the images that I captured while driving the Panorama Route in South Africa earlier this year. It’s a beautiful scenic drive with lots of opportunities to stop and take short walks to view waterfalls and breathtaking vistas, like the three rondavels. If you are travelling to South Africa, it is definitely a day trip worth taking.
I hope you enjoy my selections for the day, and wishing everyone a fantastic week ahead!
I chose bird’s for the month of August, partially with the (misguided) hope that I would get out shooting some of the local birds. Unfortunately, work and life got in the way of that, and the hummingbirds have come and gone this year without my taking a single image of them.
I really enjoyed focusing on birds though, and I still have a lot of images to go through, so I am sure it is a topic I am going to revisit. I did a lot of the bird image edits in Topaz Studio, as I find that the AI Clear function is excellent for bringing out detail in feathers, without the image ending up looking crunchy. It makes some images so easy to edit it almost feels like cheating!
All work and no play are making Jen a very dull girl indeed. That’s not really true; I have been getting out golfing and enjoying the last of the summer-ish weather, but my photography blog is not really the place to be talking about my golf game! I haven’t picked up my camera a single time the month of August, and I absolutely need to change that moving into September.
Head on over to my gallery page for more of my favourite images.
I feel like getting creative this month, so I am going to concentrate on sharing some of my artistic impression images this month. I have a few I have already flagged as candidates for editing, and am looking forward to the task 🙂 Topaz software, where I generally work on these types of edits, has released a new version of Topaz Studio, and I really need to learn how it works, rather than looking at the icon on my task bar, and using the original version instead. Hopefully this will force me to spend the time watching a tutorial or two on how the new software works, and get it into my workflow.
For those of you that are printing out the half fold or clipboard style calendar pages, here are your links for September and October:
Travelling through southern Africa, pretty much any time of year, will provide the opportunity to see a great variety of birds. Today I chose to focus on ones with feathers in shades of blue. I hope you enjoy the variety of images today, and wishing you a wonderful weekend!
