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.

Home again

Well timed Polly. Set the delayed shutter release to 12 seconds, sat on the olive-press stone, Polly jumps. A split second earlier we would have had a decent action shot.

CORFU Cats. Molly's right ear

This silly little picture needs a 'LOL Cats caption. Another cold Sunday - had to nick a timber from a recently collapsed old house from below the Hovel, all my nice olive logs gone. Old pine makes great kindling, but this piece is so round and straight - how can I burn it?

The editing for the photo below was simple Photoshop stuff: 'Crop' was the essential first step, followed by 'image size' 300dpi for the main file, (but 72dpi for the blog). 'Sharpen' is required for even the sharpest of digital images from a cheap camera. 'Cut Out' filter was applied, then a little 'Grain' and a fair amount of 'Clone Stamp' to cover the defects and extend the image a bit, especially to the right. The axe was repositioned with 'lassoo + move, and the hole left in the background was clone-stamped. My favourite filters are 'Cut Out' and 'Angled Strokes' to give the look of being painted.

There is a grey area between pictures and graphics. The 'graphic-design' features of this picture are the clear separation of the units; rocks, block, axe, bench, cat, background. The 'art' is up to the viewer in a way. For a simple picture to be pleasant to the eye, the lines that draw the eye around the image need to be smooth, and should tend to lead the eye to important parts of the picture. Jumping from distraction to distraction, although you may not notice this happening, is not helpful.

This post has been a bit disjointed because pictures would not load with their text. Connection is awful once the sun was up here on sunny Corfu. Thanks for dropping by.

Out the back. A photo-composition.

Started to-day's posts at the crack of dawn - too late now to load images. The original camera image and an intermediate picture are helpful to show the process of composing, please come back for them if you have to. Until a scanner is installed recent digital pictures are all I have to work with, but will get out more now that spring is on its way.

Composition is a wide subject, and only partly a matter of geometry. Personal habits of framing the picture develop slowly but one of the most basic habits to acquire is to avoid centralizing the main subject every time. This requires a little effort with auto-focus because the area that focuses is always central on simple cameras. If you focus on the subject (or main subject), keep the release half pressed, and then frame your picture, you will have taken a step towards creating a picture - rather than being an automatic extension of an automatic camera!

A second very important habit to acquire is being prepared to move around a bit (if possible) to avoid distracting details near your main subject. Posts or trees 'growing' out of a person's head is the great cliche for this. A good editing program is a modern miracle for the photographer, and 'clone stamp' or 'healing brush' are fabulous tools.

Don't forget to send me any picture you like, maybe to play with at this end. Go well.

Molly on the wall

Sorry, I could not get the picture and text (below) to post together. This post is the first of a series which deals with composition in photography, and simple editing in Photoshop. The picture below is the cropped but un-edited image. It's all upside down. It will be sorted, or my name's not Dr Awsom.

notes - composition and editing

The picture straight from camera was not a bad composition; editing is mostly cleaning up distracting details - entirely with Photoshop 'clone stamp. The rock Molly is sitting on was extended for a better base to the picture.

Most lines tend to lead the eye to Molly's own which was painted a bit - a little colour and a pupil. Her profile was lightened to read better against her body.

The movement in this picture is the strong diagonal - top left > bottom right, and the 'swing' of Molly's head. There is a weak diagonal formed by the branches and the rocks bottom left. This creates a balance.

Molly's outline is fairly clear, but a bit 'lumpy' , not very 'cat-shaped'. This, for me is the main fault.

There is a 'co-incidence' that normally I would have edited out, but left in. Its a small thing but looks almost deliberate. When you find it your eyes will keep returning to it.

Let me know what it is. And thank you for looking.