Sometimes Cloudy in Virginia

Keeping with the late-week posting of an old photo, I found this shot of a goldfish cracker lost by my daughter outside the house on the way to the pool this summer.  Within the short time we were down at the pool, the ants came out to play and went to town on their unexpected snack.  By the next day, the goldfish was completely gone.

I took the picture with a wide open aperture to get the very narrow depth of field and enhanced the effect with a strong vignette.   Comments/critiques would be appreciated (click for larger view).

I’ve never been great at keeping up with a blog, photo or otherwise.   Because of that, I refuse to promise any kind of regular photo posts, but I’m trying.  My ultimate goal would be to post two photos a week – one new capture for the week and one old one that I never got around to processing.

The photo below was taken just this past weekend.  I was hanging out with my daughter in the basement as she was arranging her crayons on the table.  I decided to snap a few pictures, and liked this one the best.  I shot it in low light without a flash, leaving it a little grainier than some photos, but I like the effect.  I performed a little color corrections, levels adjustment, and added a little vignette.  Finally, I sharpened the end result and added a border.

Please leave a comment if you have an opinion or reaction for this picture (click for full-size view).

I’m late to the game on this trick, but I just learned it today so I think it’s pretty cool.  I’ve been sharpening images with Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask for quite a while.  It has worked pretty well for me, though it isn’t terribly easy to selectively apply or adjust after the fact.  Enter the Hgh Pass Filter sharpening method… I first heard it this morning, catching up on an old podcast from TWIP.  I did a little searching to find out more and found two nice tutorials on the method at Layers Magazine and PhotoshopSupport.com.  The basics are:

1. Create a duplicate layer from your image
2. Apply the High Pass Filter (radius somewhere between 1-3 pixels seems to work well)
3. Change blending mode to Overlay (optionally Soft Light or Hard Light)
4. Adjust opacity of the layer to your sharpening needs.

Read the linked articles for more information and sample images.  The advantage is a layer whose opacity you can adjust to increase/decrease the effect, as well as being able to easily mask the layer to selectively apply the filter.  Very cool.