'Nuff to make a willow weep

Two luvyduvy poems from my tender middle-age. These are for Willow, Call in, you will be well rewarded.


Singular Symbol.


Were there a bindweed with thorns
And the innocent face of a rose:
With the scent of sweet lilac
And the powers of nightshade,


and no less a tendency to carnivourizm
than the guiltless venus fly-trap, the lovelost
poet in me would, I suppose deem it a
singular symbol of that pointless passion
I am still naive enough to refer to
as 'love' Know what I mean?




Only one generation out of phase.


Insuly to injury
Pathos on perfidy,
Twenty nine reasons for tears
And all of them years.


But there's a brighter side.
Who would not say I tried
To love without deceipt?
If with enough conceit


Oh! Heartless destiny
Why do you toy with me?
Weeds in my heart you have sown.
Just leave me alone.

Unsynchronized

Oi Jerry, did you hear about Ruthie being stood up at the restaurant - 23 years she waited, so I'm told, then he brought her some primroses he found by the road and that was supposed to make it all OK .     Stoppit Piggy, you eggerate everything.........

Tips for Better Pics.

Hello, me Smokey, calendar model, bit unemployed at the moment. See the wound on my throat? Buggsie did that and I was nervous for months after. Here's a word from my sponsor.


Thanks Smokey. Not a lot of work to improve the top shot. Why did I have almost nothing to do?


Because I always set the camera on the highest 'Sensitivity' (ISO) level possible.


And because I always use 'Manual' exposure.


Low ISO, or 'sensitivity' settings may give better colour quality, but the cost in cloudy conditions, or indoors, will usually be images spoiled by camera movement during exposure. If you have a camera that will allow it, set the sensitivity 200 or 400 for sunlight, and 800 at other times. Higher ISO = shorter exposures = sharper pictures.


If you cannot or do not want to control the exposure manually, try to avoid large areas in the picture that are much lighter or darker than your subject matter. The camera simply does NOT know what the central subject is. The camera looks at most of the picture and measures the average amount of light seen. This average is usually wrong because the subject is either lighter or darker than the unimportant areas in the background or foreground that it measures as well.


Believe me, Higher ISO settings, and higher shutter speeds set manually, are the two most important factors in improving your pictures.  Almost as important as pointing the camera in the right direction, and from the right place.    


Please send me pictures to work on for this blog, either to publish or to return.

The Romantisization of Roxana's Horses

Roxana Balint kindly mailed me this beautiful picture for me to play around with. Horses are well known for not standing exactly where photographers want them to, and posts sometimes need deleting (I know what you're thinking) The black horse was too near the tree and also the fence above , and too level with the white horse.


The little forground tree swings the eye into the composition nicely, but the posts interfered with this movement. The sky was easily selected with the wand to be romantisized a little, and saturation generally was increased very slightly.


Angled Strokes were applied with minimum stoke length in order to unify the picture and disguise any flaws from repainting (when the horse was moved, for instance, and when the sky was selected).


Details were cleaned up with Clone Stamp at either 50% or 100% opacity. So easy, but rubbish does not improve a picture just because it's there, does it? Thank you Roxana and Romania for being beautiful.

Biba Playing the Straw

One raw, two edits.  The middle picture was desaturated a little and the colour balance altered very slightly to create a tinted sepia look.  The bottom picture has fuller, more natural saturation.  I wonder which her mum likes best.  Now we are going to find out if she ever visits her dad's blog!  Look for a comment below.  I am taking bets at 5:4on.  Well, I'm broke, you wouldn't ask for decent odds........

November Panorama, Corfu.

The top picture was how Photoshop combined two upright landscapes of the valley and bay looking towards Corfu Town. In 'Image Size' dimensions and the resolution were chosen. For future printing resolution should be 300 dpi, but for screen viewing where no magnification is expected 72 dpi is OK. Instead of cropping the mis-match I filled in the blank bits using the 'clone-stamp'


The foreground was selected with the 'wand' and places where the selection was not good were mended, also with the clone-stamp. The selected foreground was lightened with the 'levels' tool which enables you to lighten, darken, and modify contrasts. then the foreground was 'deselected' and the colours were brightened with 'saturation'. (ctrl +U) . With practice, and using keyboard shortcuts, this amount of work takes a few minutes only.


If you have an image or two you would like improved simply, just mail me a file I can import into photoshop. If there is anything interesting I can do, and with your permission I will post the effort here. Otherwise the new file will be posted back.

Oops, dogz!

Socs has gone home, she knows how far to go.  Bunny will amble along to the end while Polly finds herself in the garden of the big house. Who's that barking?     My favorite flower of all - the Periwinkle we call it.  Ok, that's it, Polly is back up the tree sharpish, Molly is off, Bunny turns round and begins the amble back.

Hot off the press(frying pan)

Another Sunday without bread. Another inspiration from the driven Dr.Awsom. The Peanut Paratha. A quick picture while it is still hot - a piece missing? Just testing. Try this at home - peanuts in the blender - salt pepper, whatever - about the same amount of flour - enough water to make a dough - fry in olive oil (of course) The result? Nutricious ! (geddit?)