Tag: Indianapolis Botanical Gardens

Spring is in the Air

I still need to process the pictures for the next round of blog posts so figured I’d take the easy path to the quota this month.  Been pretty exhausted from work lately and it’s going to get EXTREMELY busy in about a week so this extended weekend is all about getting some things out of the way and hopefully some sleep.  Thanks to a mouse this week my slumber was cut short .. but more on that in a future post.  Today is all about celebrating the arrival of Spring.  What’s the best way to do that?  How about some of these:

How’s that for getting rid of the Winter blahs?  These flowers all came from the Indianapolis Zoo/Botanical Gardens trip we took back in 2011.  While processing the statues for the previous two posts I found these sprinkled in.  Linda is usually the flower girl but since she keeps trampling into my bird shoots figured it was fair play.  I’m not sure I mentioned it or not, but my digital darkroom received an upgrade over the holidays.  Although I was becoming quite efficient at Lightroom 3, we decided to go ahead and upgrade to version 4.  It seems those people over at Adobe decided to make some changes that impacted my standard workflow.  Since these shots had a nice range of color and contrast, figured they’d be a good place to start re-learning.

To Adobe’s credit, they did carry over the old interface elements for those items imported into a Lightroom 3 created albums.  Not a big fan of paying for things I don’t use so immediately chose to convert those images to the new format and the experimenting began.  One thing that is immediately apparent is the improved ability to pull detail out of the shadows and recover it from the highlights.

There definitely needs to be soak time with the new controls.  Kelby has been educating me nightly on how to get the most out of Lightroom 4 (the book of the month.. okay maybe more like two or three).  Nothing too earth shattering, but did explain the white balance eye dropper which has been baffling me ever since I started with version 3.  His chapter on how to add meta tags on load was also a big help.

Hit the jump to continue ushering in Spring

Continue reading Spring is in the Air

An Eye for the Odd

It’s dog show weekend which means I’m sitting in a hotel in some far off distant land trying to entertain myself. This is Linda and the boys thing so I’m generally around to Sherpa the 25 suitcases each of the dogs has to travel with. The good thing is I can be pacified with a computer and access to the Internet.   So, when not watching YouTube videos of cats displaying their DNA entwined stupidity I can pop out a few blog posts. Correction, I also have to spend the total of 8 minutes watching the dogs run (4 runs for each dog averaging 60 seconds a piece). For the curious, that means I will have spent 60 times that amount in travel this weekend just getting to and from the event location.

Fortunately, I already had some images processed in the digital darkroom before I came so I do not have to deal with that portion of the post while on the road. This is a good thing in this case since these shots needed a lot of work having spent a better part of this shoot in harsh light. If that made you think of the Indy Zoo shoot you are tracking well – this batch also came from that same outing, but taken at the Botanical Gardens right next door to the Zoo. I am not a huge flower guy, but in all honesty I had a great time there. Not so much due to the flowers, but thanks to an awesome collection of these:

I have always had an affinity for odd statues and other creative art.  This is definitely why I’m a huge fan of Allerton Park (link here).  After this trip you can add the Indy Botanical Gardens to my fan list.  This place was loaded with these small odd statues in very creative settings.  The shot above (and below) was taken at a small pool of water.  Of all the shots, these two are the ones that pleased me the most.  The fact they came out as well as they did was due to some hard work in the field.

I distinctly remember spending a looooong time at this tiny pool trying to figure out the most pleasing composition.  The harsh light was causing some nasty bounce off the water and washing out the features in the statue.  Eventually I found a good angle (by lowering the position of the shot) which allowed me to get the detail in the statue itself as well as the reflection – the reflection was the primary target.  This angle also allowed for the water to turn to glass – if you are curious, those were handheld without any filters.

Hit the jump to see even more shots of the statues at the gardens!

Continue reading An Eye for the Odd