Creepy Baby...and the sewing machine

I like Still Life photography and even have had more fun with it when I use toys. Most toys in the beginning were given to me. This Creepy Baby was given to me by a little boy when I was baby sitting for him.

He said the toy was 'yucky'. I asked mom about it and she grimaced saying it may have been her toy as a kid. Please take it.
It just looks like a demented toy of sorts and thus it was named Creepy Baby.

He's been around for a couple of years and is small enough to fit easily in a pocket.

I usually toss him in my camera bag along with the LIL Bear which was also a donated toy.

He ends up in so many places!

But!
There needs to be a bit of cuteness in this world of madness, right?
Who doesn't love a cute Dragon Baby?

The mushrooms and funky flowers were made by me. I also made the green Popsicle stick thingy with green stuff on it...I couldn't help but have a bit of fun.
The tiny treasure chest came in a huge bag of stuff from my Grandmother Pearl's belongings. It is very old and had a thimble in it.

I wonder if cute dragons get along with the more dangerous looking types...

I guess we will find out.

See? I'm a kid at heart.

When we were kids, my brother, sister, and I used to take our toys and build them forts on the saggy ping pong table in the basement. We used to 'set up' soldiers and other toys to present a story to the viewer. We'd leave The Set Up for a day or so and then change it again.
We entertained ourselves for hours in the basement. Huge battles were won and lost. The Kitty Hotel was built. It featured an eraser that was shaped like a pink cat. I had a yellow dragon eraser.  We never used them on the end of our pencils.

They raged battles with the soldiers, until we launched marbles at all of them and knocked them down.

So this evening I messed around with some items I found chucked in the big shed. I wondered what it would be like to create a scene with Creepy Baby and his Nefarious Friendly Frogs.

So yes, I had some fun which took my mind off the news.

Today's rap sheet ran like this...
I wanted to find the plug for my sewing machine. After thoroughly going through every box in the basement and cleaning and organizing ...and labeling everything...
I went upstairs and did the same thing to the tiny closets and the little attic space.
I have a cart-full of junk to haul to the dumpster.

I even went through all the items stored in the little Red Shed.
No cord for the sewing machine.

So I ordered a replacement before chores and supper.

And then this evening, I had a bit of fun....

Stay safe.
Stay well.

Taking photos/Random Thoughts

Of course there will always be the debate about how much editing is acceptable.
There will always be a huge debate.
To Edit or To Not Edit.

I am somewhat in the middle. A little editing can go a very long way. 

I like to take .RAW files now. I can breeze through them in CorelAfterShotPro 3 and get a good job done quickly. I guess I am plugging Corel because they haven't gone the way of Adobe where you have to pay monthly to use Lightroom and CC.

I've also found ON1 to be extremely easy and fun to use.
It has the ability of taking my .ORF and my .NEF files and working with them and I can save them in a variety of file types.

However, I am always interested in improving what I do. I read up on tutorials and watch the occasional video. 

One of the items I see floating around the internet is videos that teach you in certain programs of how to change the sky in your photo that you've taken.
Yikes! Okay, that is fun and it can add a lot of drama to a photo.

But when did we stop taking real photos? Or better yet, why do some folks post edit photos and spend more time on them in the digital dark room than they did thinking about taking the shot.

I've harped on this before. And I am as guilty as the next person for post editing shots. And perhaps I am all wrong too...

I have learned a few tricks that could help me get a more interesting shot than the conventional way. But swapping out skies seems a bit extreme for me.

I don't mind cloning out a small distraction, but going to the far end of the spectrum is a bit unrealistic.
So I don't know if I'd qualify as a purest ~ no, I am not. But I won't spend hours swapping skies, cloning in or out rocks, and other items on a photo.

I think about what I want to do, watch the weather for a perfect sky and then try to compose something that will work.

Here is an edit that is very obvious.

Here is another. Replaced sky added a moon, but it is all quite obvious.

Here is a shot I took a long time to think out and do. I took many shots on a beautiful morning. I used an Infrared filter and also did some shots with a ND filter.

I came up with this, edited to black and white.

[This shot was taken obviously before our house remodel.]

I like to do less as more.

I studied the lighting in this shot and went with what filtered through the window in the late evening out onto the porch.

I've done some pretty wild stuff, but always seem to come back to the basics.
I even once in a while go a bit overboard in exploring things like HDR.

Recently I've gotten an interest in bugs. I've read up on how some of the professionals get great 'insect' shots and learned about something called Image Stacking. Image stacking led me to Focus Peaking and searching out how to manual focus properly in an Automatic Focus world.

I'm making the circles. Landscapes, Macro, Panoramic, High Dynamic Range, Long Exposures, Still Life, and Infrared Photography, a bit of over the top artistic stuff, and then back to the basics.

All challenges to make taking a photo interesting and challenging at the time.

Edit? Of course. Have fun with it. 
After all when the debate dust settles, I guess it all comes back to the photographer and what the Artist Photographer wants to portray.

I guess if you are going to take photos, you just need to enjoy what you are doing.