Simplify.

Oh my goodness, enough with the hideous cold!  It is March (in two hours) and our high for the first two days of March will be -5.

Really?

More below zero high temperatures? 

My soul went numb as the weather forecast was announced this morning.

Oh, and it is not enough to have below zero temperatures, oh no.  There has to be 15 - 30 mph winds on top of that.

So I consoled myself tonight by purchasing another Topaz Labs plug-in for Photoshop.  I got Topaz Simplify.  I am still trying to settle into my style of photography, but I am thinking that my style will end up leaning towards abstract, less mainstream photos.

(I will have to keep practicing some mainstream type shots to continue to improve technically, but nearly all of my favorite shots have some sort of artsy twist.) 

I did not get out to shoot photos today because it is freakin C O L D.  And getting colder.  But I pulled out a photo from earlier this week and 'Simplified' it.

This was a photo taken with my Lensbaby, a photo I did not even really enjoy until I added one of the Topaz Simplify filters.   I know it's no genius photo - but I find it interesting and mysterious.  

I also took an old photo of a bow and added the 'oil painting' filter.  You can see a dark bluish spot near the center, a shadow spot that I couldn't get rid of.  (A bit of poor technique in the original photo, sorry).  But the filter makes the photo unique, and I like it!

Tomorrow my goal is to photograph my cats, so that'll be a challenge.  But I can do it while warm indoors.

See on,
Julee

No bokeh for me, yet some unexpected beauty.

Over my lunch hour I drove to the local botanical gardens to attempt to capture a photo containing 'foreground bokeh'.  (This was one of the current DPChallenge photo challenges.) 

So there I was, out in the bitter cold, trying to capture a beautiful blur in the photo's foreground with something fantastically in focus in the background.  Unsurprisingly, very few had wandered through the gardens and I got a pretty decent workout walking through knee-high snow.  Surprisingly (to me) however, there was a lot of beauty.

Also probably unsurprising was my lack of success.  It will be interesting to see what other folks enter, even a Google image search did not give me many ideas to emulate.  But I figured that flowers make for pretty background bokeh, so maybe if I found something pretty off in the distance then I could get my foreground out-of-focus.

Nope.  Not even close. 

But I did get a few shots that I liked.

See on and stay warm!
Julee

The odd case of pinkness in the giant mine.

Among the fabulous views I enjoyed during my weekend in the Black Hills was a giant mine in Lead.  While we had parked our car right next to the mine all weekend, large piles of snow against the fence and a sign instructing us not to climb the fence or step on the flowers to catch a view of the mine kept us from seeing anything.  (We saw people totally stepping on the non-existent flowers in the flower bed to see inside the mine, but I am kind of a rule follower so my brain strongly desired to see the mine in the manner the good folks of Lead intended.)

Finally on our last day we walked the two blocks to the viewing center and boy was it cool.  If you look closely on the snowy side, there is a fence four 'rows' up - no way would I be caught walking there!

I am still stumped as to the purpose of the mysterious pink item observed deep in the mine.  (See photo below.)  Ideas?  It sure looks like a ticket booth to me, but that's just ridiculous.

Wishing you a view of something unusual.

See on,

Julee

The unexpected.

So my husband and I took a long weekend vacation to Lead, SD and the Terry Peak Ski Area.  We had pretty great weather.  It snowed overnight leaving a nice dusting of fresh snow to ski on, and temperatures were between 30 - 40 degrees F most of the time.

We stayed in a fabulous hotel, the Town Hall Inn (which I highly recommend).  They gave us a box of chocolates on Valentine's Day and they scraped the snow off our car before we woke up the morning we were leaving.  Talk about service, definitely above and beyond.  Plus the room was amazing.  We stayed in the 'Judges Chambers' which had lots of windows and was huge.  It was quiet, we never heard any neighbors.  Although I do have to say the City of Lead is very enthusiastic about their plowing, which they would do at 4 am and again at 7 am those days they plowed.

One highlight of the trip for me was an unexpected moment when we were walking along the main street in Lead and out popped three deer from the front yard of a house onto the sidewalk in front of us.  (This was my favorite shot even though two of the deer had already moved beneath an evergreen.)

My other favorite time was driving through the Badlands.  We saw maybe two other cars, so had several lovely private hikes.  We also enjoyed a lot of wildlife.  (I saw my first wild cat, but he was too fast for my camera.) 

 

There was, of course, all the usual loveliness of the Black Hills.  The evergreens looked glorious with their fresh coat of snow each day.

See on,
Julee

Wild trees of winter.

I have just fallen in love with the trees this winter.  I love that over winter you can see each bend and branch of every tree.  I find them just gorgeous.

It helps that my hour long commute in both the mornings and evenings takes place very near the magic hour, when light makes everything incredible. 

Here are some of my favorites from Sunday.

The cold can sure be miserable, but finding something lovely to photograph sure helps me forgot about it.

See on,
Julee

Dancing Trees.

Today was a beautiful, sunny day.  Had it not been bitterly cold I would have had a delightful time out making photographs today.

But I braved the cold for a good two minutes at a time before scrambling back into my car to warm up.  It was darn cold.  Colder than it should be for February.

But my reward were these Lenbaby gems.  They are my dancing trees.

I could not decide which I liked better.   In the top shot there is nothing in focus, but the trees appear more 'active' to me.  In the second shot there is a tree just slightly left of center that is in focus, but the trees aren't dancing quite as much to my eyes.  But with the second shot I also got trees throughout the scene.  (I suppose I can fix that top photo to where trees fill the scene quite easily in Photoshop, there is just no time tonight.)  Both photos were taken with my Lensbaby Sweet 35.

So you decide.  Is one better?  Or maybe you like sharp photos and neither of these appeal to you.  (Sorry.)  I got a few shots with my regular lenses but I'm off the watch the Olympics - more later...

See on!
Julee

Orange highway barrels and the snow.

A few weeks ago I noticed some orange highway barrels nearly buried in snow.  Great photo op, although challenging to actually capture since they were in the middle of the interstate.

This week I pulled off into the median and got some shots.  It took three tries, but a got a few shots that I liked.

There are several possible reasons for the differences in snow color.  I used two different cameras for these shots, the top shot with a Nikon P7800 and the bottom two shots with a Lumix FZ200.  Also, the top photo was taken near dawn facing east while the last two shots were taken at dust while facing west.

The final reason is likely that I shoot jpegs.  (Had I shot in raw, it is my understanding that I could have 'fixed' the light balance to get the snow a nicer white.) 

Alas I still have not figured out how to open and process raw files.  I know, pretty basic for someone who aims at enthusiast level of photography.  But I got stuck processing once after shooting in raw and became frustreated.  Plus I like most of my jpegs and can typically process them to my liking despite the limitations of the jpeg file.  Some day I'll try again.

These barrels are between mile marker 138 and 139 just north of Brookings, SD.

See on,
Julee

Color explosion. A break from the winter blahs.

Today my challenge was to create blur.  Winter is so gray and bland, especially now that folks have turned off all of the holiday lights, that I wanted to play with color.

So I pulled out my stash of fabric and practiced the blur technique I had tried (rather unsuccessfully) a couple of weeks ago.

Booyah!

I love that it appears like light is emanating from the center fabric.  That first shot came from altering the focus during exposure with my 85 mm lens.  Here was my best Lensbaby shot.  I never did nail my vision with the Lensbaby.  (But I was approaching the hour mark of photographing, and during the week I tend to run out of patience fairly quickly, and move on even if I don't get the exact shot I want.)

I also liked a few photos that were totally out-of-focus.  Such lovely spring colors - very calming.

 

 

Color on.
Julee

South Dakota winter landscape.

The painfully cold, below zero daytime temperatures, are dragging on and on.  The daylight is lasting a bit longer which helps my spirits some, but it is just too darn cold.

I've kind of lost my zeal for...most everything that involves getting out of bed and stepping into the ice box of a world. 

I think my big mistake was taking a few days off from wearing long johns.  (Yes indeed, I wear up to three layers most days.)  And when I was doing that the cold did not seem so bad.  But it is February.  Surely the long johns aren't quite as necessary right?  Haha.  Wrong.

And while I'm going to go back to wearing many layers tomorrow, I fear the cold has seeped into my bones and it's just too late.

Probably I'll be fine.

Despite the cold and the low level of enthusiasm, I went out photographing this weekend.  We had lots of sun and the sun was nice.  But we also had wind and about two minutes into photographing at my first stop my hands hurt with cold.

I stuck it out for about an hour.  (DPChallenge has a challenge going with the topic of 'Minimalist Landscape' and if South Dakota isn't perfect for that challenge I don't know what is.)

Now I wasn't particularly successful in getting a great shot - but I gave it a go.  And with the help of photoshop I liked this end result:

Other shots from my excursion: 

See on despite your chattering teeth,
Julee