I wandered out to the porch this morning, no coffee yet, and noticed Ellen had her OM-1 on the table, flash with a green light, and she was out back looking around. She is pretty aware and has a good eye so as Sherlock Holmes would say ‘the games a foot’ !
On any given morning my mind needs coffee. Now it can require a cattle prod…or a camera ready for something I am afraid to miss out on.
Pre Coffee Fumbling Flash Buttons
I needed to start out slow, definitely not a small critter that’s moving. The flash buttons are small, but not many so getting the iT32 into manual was easy. Power is more than expected so practice, and TTL, is needed.
The Black-eyed Suzy are fading but there’s a lot around so finding some decent ones in the dark was easy.
Pre Coffee Fumbling Flash Buttons
Specs; OM-1 (1), OM 12-100, GODOX iT32, Lightroom, DxO Color Efex.
There are large bushes along the side of a swamp pond on the Magnolia Plantation property. I never really paid much attention to the area until recently.
The ACE Basin is usually shown here with the large marshes and swamps that has made the area home to an enormous amount of wildlife. However the rivers and marshes that make up the basin feed into the Atlantic Ocean through thousands of inlets.
Botany Bay started out as three different plantations, they eventually became one, and finally a state owned preserve as part of the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources.
Low tide in the bay opens the paths to one of the states most beautiful ‘bone yards’. A shore of old trees only accessible for a few hours each day.
These photographs were taken at sunrise in the ‘bone yard’. It requires a quick hike but this is what you find at the end of a snady trail.
Botany Bay, South Carolina
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Botany Bay, South Carolina
Botany Bay, South Carolina
Botany Bay, South Carolina
Botany Bay, South Carolina
Botany Bay, South Carolina
Specs; OM-1 (1), OM 12-40 f2.8. Finished in ON1 Photo RAW, DxO Color Efex, Topaz DeNoise.
Ellen likes fresh vegetables, local farm raised meat, and eggs. Going to the local Farmers Market is part of her weekly routine. There’s also a farm here that grows flowers. Each week they bring in the most recent blooms from their acres of wild flowers.
Below is this weeks crop. Pretty impressive.
Farmers Market
This image was finished with ON1 Photo RAW. It was shot indoors, no flash. Using ON1, rather than Lightroom was a test. The flow was to use multiple softwares that have specific strengths that general editors do not and see how well the flow worked. Most editors don’t ’play well with others’. This is one of Lightroom’s strengths.
The work flow was;
ON1 was used to crop, apply a mask to the background, run a color enhancer, last soften the colors.
The image was sent to Topaz DeNoise for a standard low light DeNoise. Topaz saved the modified image back to ON1 as a tiff file.
The image was sent to DxO Color Efex. A contrast filter was applied, a detail enhanced was applied, but deleted, a darken/lighten center filter was applied. Color Efex saved the modified image back to ON1 as a tiff file.
ON1 assigned a color code to mark the image as complete, an export function saved the finished image to jpg, with a predefined date and name, in a new subfolder it created under the original folder.
The end result was this image, just about the same as Lightroom would have made. And it actually took the same time I would have spent in Adobe. ON1 is faster than Lightroom (much faster) and has the same interactions with other imaging systems so it’s really nothing different than I would have done in LR.
If the editor works smooth the transition is not all that much different than if I had done the work directly inside an editor. Except these softwares do the function better, they’re made for specific purposes, not a one size fits all.
OK, this is now much longer than I had planned so I will go to the final goal in post processing for me. The best I can get is using special software on multiple images. Basically get the first image in a series, like a Heron in flight over a swamp, the way I want. Then have all the other images in that series get the changes ‘pasted’ to them. Consistency across them all. With the flow above it’s easy, even using multiple softwares, if the editor ‘plays well with others’.
ON1 is getting pretty close, and works fast, at an inexpensive one time purchase.
Wrought iron is an art form on display throughout the Lowcountry. I think the old cemeteries are the best place to find it. As it rusts the colors can be quite vivid.
The post caps on this fence are meant to be old middle eastern tea pots, a common theme. The caps here even include the ornate handles. All these fences are very detailed and a favorite subject of mine.
Rusted Iron Work
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