Showcasing the beauty of Mother Nature
I was away for the weekend and after arriving back home late yesterday afternoon, I completely forgot to work on my Sunday post. In a stroke of luck though, the images I had prepared earlier last week happen to be monochrome, so they work perfectly for today too.
I’m feeling pretty tired today so I will keep this one brief… I don’t think anyone needs an explanation of these images anyways 🙂
Wishing everyone a fantastic week!
I don’t think I have a ton of overlap between blog followers and Instagram followers, so today I decided to share some monochrome elephant images that have been seen before on Instagram over the years, but not here.
If you are on IG, head on over to https://www.instagram.com/jensawicky and check things out 🙂
I hope you enjoy, have a great day!
Before I get to the images I created for this post, my public service announcement for the day: Always make sure you have a backup of your computer! I made the decision to upgrade my Mac to a new operating system (not the newest one just released, the one before that, as I thought all the bugs would be worked out). Partway through the install, there was a failure and I ended up with a totally dead computer. Thankfully, I have a pretty good backup strategy, so all I lost was the edit on a single image… And I wasn’t really that happy with the edit, so it isn’t really much of a loss. I didn’t get to spend my afternoon editing as my computer was busy doing its own thing with the restore function. But if I hadn’t had that, I would have spent the day seriously freaking out.
Anyways, on to the topic at hand. I was playing around with elephant images this week, creating some of what I call my photo art or artistic impressions images. I love elephants as the subject for these types of creations, as their large size allows the subject to still be recognizable, no matter how crazy I go with different filters, textures and techniques.
I had a lot of fun working on these, I hope you enjoy them too.
Have a great week ahead!
Sometimes on safari, the vehicle is stopped to watch a small group of elephants, and quite suddenly, you find yourself in the middle of a rather large herd, with elephants to all sides of the vehicle as they make their way through the bush. I feel incredibly blessed as this has happened to me numerous times while out on game drives. For some people, the situation can feel a bit intimidating, but I always trust that my guide is reading the situation correctly, and has an exit strategy prepared in case things get dicey.
Thankfully, we’ve never had to use one of those, and instead can enjoy elephants as far as the eye can see.
I hope you enjoy my selections for today, and wishing you a wonderful week ahead.
While staying at Lion Sands River Lodge, we set out on our afternoon game drive and came across a small bachelor group of elephants. These four broke off into pairs, play fighting as the day grew dim, while a couple of other bulls grazed nearby. It’s so cool watching the interaction of these animals.
Happy Monday everyone!
My focus for the month is on elephant images, and I decided to start off with some of the adorable babies that I saw on my last safari.
I’ve had the great fortune to spend time amongst the shy ones, the boisterous ones, the playful ones and the ones too focused on food to even give the vehicle a passing glance. I adore them all. I hope that the individual character of each animal shines through these images below.
Wishing everyone a fantastic week ahead!
It seems like it has been a while since I have played around with tinted monochrome images. This elephants looked good in black and white, but felt better with the warmer, coffee tones you see below. These were taken on different days, but all fairly late in the morning, when the sun was casting harsh shadows. Conventional wisdom says that’s the time to put away the camera, but I’ll keep shooting as long as there is something interesting to look at. The bulk of an elephant and the highly textured skin seem to be able to handle harsh light quite well.
This post was originally going to be the big five, but I had images of cheetah and wild dog that I wanted to play around with, so the magnificent seven it is.
One of the reasons I wanted to focus on my photo art this month was to try and learn a bit more about Topaz Studio version 2. I’ve played around with it a bit, and watched some tutorials, but for the workflow I am using, at this stage I will be sticking with version 1. The issue that I was finding is I can’t get files to make a round trip using On1 Photo Raw. I can get the file into Studio 2, and work on it, but the only option for saving is an “Accept” button, which with the workflow I am using, appears to do nothing. I select it, but the file doesn’t get saved, exported or anything else. New software versions are typically a bit buggy, so I’ll give it a few update cycles and then play around with it again and see what happens.
One of the great things about photo editing tutorials is getting the little reminders for things that are outside of the normal workflow. In this case, the reminder was to play around with blending modes when using AI Remix, Impression and textures. For example, the cheetah image below was edited using (amongst other tools) a filter in AI Remix called Neon Rise. But changing the blend mode from normal to luminosity kept the amazing texture that the filter offered, but eliminated the wild and crazy colours for something far more subdued, and suited to the image.
I hope you enjoy the selections below. Wishing you a fantastic week ahead.
You can find some of these images in the Photo Art section of my gallery.
It’s no secret that I love elephants, and that I love editing elephant images in black and white. Here are a few from my most recent travels. I hope they brighten up your Monday 🙂
