Emperor Penguin at the Zoo (Dry Brush Filter)

Penguins are among my favorite animals to look for when I go to a zoo. As interesting as it might be to go some place like Antarctica, the reality is that I will probably never be anywhere that I might actually see a penguin in its natural habitat; the zoo is probably as close as I will ever get.

That said, one of the cool things about the Emperor Penguin is the deep golden yellow in its head, neck, and beak. It adds some color interest to an otherwise black and white animal.

Thanks for stopping by!

Tiger at the Zoo

I'm a little late for throwback Thursday, but the original for this image was taken in St. Louis back in 2005 on my Sony Cybershot DSC-F707. The original file was a JPEG, which I ran through Photomatix for HDR effect with the following result. 

I like the original tonemapped version, but, in the spirit of trying things out to see if you can make a good thing better, I took the result over to Photoshop Elements to see what would happen if I applied the Dry Brush filter.

I'm not as crazy about the result that I got here this time. I think it's because the original image was so small, and even when I dropped the Dry Brush filter brush size back to "1", it was still a little big for the image size, resulting in a little more blurring than I would have liked.

Oddly Shaped Tree

This oddly shaped tree trunk (a tree that is growing indoors) looks like it has had branches trimmed at various points in its life. Given the right imagination, one could see some kind of strange, alienesque animal in this image.

Impressionistic Chickadee (Dry Brush Filter)

Catching this chickadee faraway in flight, it appeared as something of a blur on the resulting image. What can be done? Apply Photoshop's "Dry Brush Filter", which kind of/sort of blends everything in the image together, so that the somewhat blurry chickadee now has a kind of wavy appearance, and I can (try to) call it (sort of) cool looking. Thanks for stopping by!

Snowfall Against a Wooded Background (Filters)

A few days ago, we were barely getting flurries, and I decided to see what I could capture with my camera. My shutter was clicking faster than the snow was falling, so each frame only managed to capture a few flakes per frame. (Had I set my shutter to something slower, maybe I would have gotten some interesting streaks across my picture? I'll have to try that next time...) For the first picture, I used Photoshop's Paint Daubs artistic filter. For the second, I used the Dry Brush.

Chickadee in the Snow (Dry Brush / Platinum)

In this particular case, I prefer the color to the black and white image. Not that there is much color in this picture of a chickadee, although - it surprises me how much orange/brown there is on this bird. I had always pegged the chickadee to be more of a black and white bird. 

Return of the Junco (Dry Brush / Platinum filters)

Today's post includes two versions of a photo (taken yesterday). As I opened the curtain looking out on to my deck, I saw, on the edge of the deck, a Dark-Eyed Junco. And then, I saw several of them, but as soon as they saw me (and before I could return with my camera,) they all left my deck and made for the tree line on the edge of my property. (Figures.) I did manage to get a few shots, and I liked the effect that Photoshop's Dry Brush filter added to this image, as well as the old-time look that the Platinum "Time Machine" effect (PaintShop) gave to the image, so I included both in today's post. Thanks for stopping by!

Also, I might mention a bizarre thing that happened with my camera today. I've been having a problem reported elsewhere online, in which my Sony NEX-6 can't seem to lock on to an F-stop setting and then it resets itself. There was a new problem today, in which the camera gave me a malfunction message and asked me to turn it off and turn it on again. I turned the switch to do so, and the camera would not power up. I waited, tried it again, but to no effect. Finally, I pulled out the battery, waited, re-inserted the battery, and that seems to have done the trick.