Wait, What?

Wait, what day is it? 

What happens when all of your days blend together? 

Some times you don't sleep well and other nights you are just plain restless. One of those nights I woke up ... wide awake at 1:30 in the morning. There was no going back to sleep so I went out on the porch and decided to look at the sky.

Yes, I am very fortunate to live in a 'hollow' with the nearest street lamps 12 miles away. If I go up on the ridge, the yard lights of farms across the ridge do 'pollute' the night sky. So lucky lucky me. I can admire the stars from my porch and my driveway.

Porch view of that night's Milky Way. 
It was clear enough for the naked eye, but the camera can pick up so many more details.

Is it no surprise that I fell in love with the night skies while living here for the past 29 years? 
The stars give me a sense of peace and wonderment [as do most things in nature].

I went out to try a selfie of me looking up at the Milky Way. It didn't work. Other years I've gotten the beam from my headlamp to show up in the humid air...
Not so this night. I tried over and over. So then I turned the red light on and twirled it for a 25 second photo.

It is called light painting, which I never really got the hang of.

But I thought it turned out neat.

I'm going to try it again but wear dark clothes and use some glow sticks. 

Here are some random Toy shots I just felt like doing on an overcast afternoon. 
The Goat herder seems unaware that he is being watched. Squatch who is one of my favorite toys is still around Aurora! He often joins the Legos on adventures!
 

This Rock Monster set up on the cookie tray with a clay mushroom I made, along with bits of plastic leaves and chunks of wood.

Of course. the Evil King and Queen of ... hmmm, I don't know what to name their kingdom, do you have a suggestion?

While out watching the hummingbirds and the clearwing hummingbird moth, I placed an HO figure on one of the Blazing Stars just to see what would occur. 

And he looked as though he became a Bee Keeper! 👇

I spent some time outside yesterday morning with both my macro and long lens. I still have to go through a lot of photos of flowers, birds, bees, and other insects. By 9am, I had finished up outside and mowed a tiny bit before coming in for a shower.

The rest of the day was taken up with a morning visit with hubby's nurse and and afternoon visit for his sponge bath. Rich looks forward to these interactions.

So, yesterday was Monday. Let's see what today brings.

I'm  going to meet a friend I met at the gym and go see her place. 

I feel a bit wicked knowing that I have some free time to do something different.

So yeah.

Wait

What?

Kinda flopped

 The smoke from the fires kept me from seeing the Milky Way and the Northern Lights. But it sure didn't keep me from trying.

I set my alarm for 1:30am and got up and dragged my sorry butt out of bed and walked to the Meadow. I had a little camp chair I took with me and set things up. 

Not much happened in the skies. So I decided to play with my headlamp to see if I could do some experimental light painting on the Hickory tree in the Meadow.

The sky was lit up with very faint colors but it was really just brown-ish from the smoke. Interestingly enough, it was very cool out and there was no evidence of fireflies anywhere.

By 3AM I gave up on the lights but was happy to faintly see the Big Dipper. So I took this last shot and decided to head inside. I got a wee Star Trail as a result. The smoke completely obliterated where the Milky Way was supposed to appear.

I must have bumped the tripod a bit when I walked away. I can see it in the photo but I kept it anyway.

So this is what the skies really looked like above 👆. However, just for fun I did something pretty awful and fun.

Same photo as the one in the Meadow with the orangish-brownish sky.
I cheated with adding a sky swap.
So of course I would title these as what I wish I had seen. However, it sadly was not true.

The scary part it the ease at which I was able to change the photo. 

Okay. Well onto a couple of other Meadow photos that are not faked. I was able to get out just before sunrise and take these as the other half was up on this morning at 4am and had eaten his breakfast and had coffee so I could get out and enjoy a few morning moments in the Meadow.

We had a very busy week last week and even busier weekend with lots of comings and goings.  

The horse we called Fifteen went to her new family where she will get tons of attention and love. 

I was surprised, I haltered her up, and led her to their tiny trailer where she loaded like a pro. To her credit, she is smart but I don't have the time for her. The last time she had loaded into a trailer was the day she came home to us 6 years ago.

The mule gals absolutely had a fit after she left. But after 24 hours, they quieted down as if nothing in their lives had changed.

Editing ~ Creative Stuff

I started doing photography and felt that every photo just had to be perfect and straight out of the camera as I saw it.

I joined Flickr and started seeing other photographers doing editing and other things to photos, I met those who did abstract computer art, and... suddenly my world started to expand.

I began to learn the basics photoshop, GIMP, and other programs. I tried most anything I could get my hands on. Yesterday I came across something in my searches called 'Paint with Light Effect'. I decided to check it out.
I'd done Painting with Light at night and had a lot of fun. However, I don't often go out late at night and do photography.

It has been fun, and so I wondered what this new Painting with Light was.

However, it was not what I expected. It was painting light within a photo to dramatically change a photo.

I happened on something called the Briscoe Lighting Effect.

Tony Kuyper covers this in his WordPress blog and has a short video regarding the method that uses CreativeSuite by Adobe. I can't afford the CS by Adobe and I don't like 'renting' a program and paying for it monthly.

I started using ON Photo, the free version after Adobe went to a pay monthly fee. I kept my version of CS2.  I eventually went for ON1 RAW and I like the program. I own it and can upgrade if I want. It is a bit easier than CS, but it is not as creative.

All that gobbledygook aside, I thought I'd take some techniques and try to use them in ON1 RAW.

Here is the original photo:

Pretty boring isn't it? This is not what I imagined it to be as my eye saw the sunlight just barely coming in from the far side of the stream.

I also wanted the photo to have a dreamlike quality to it.

After a lot of missteps and start overs, I stopped here. Yes, this is what I wanted.

I edited the specific colors in the far end of the stream. I also used a texture layer to darken the sides and one more cloud layer to put the reflection of the sky in the water.

It isn't realistic, but it was something I saw in my mind's eye when I took the shot.

Here is what the ON1 editing program looks like and why it is SO easy to work with.
No, they do not pay me to talk about their programs.

I'd met someone recently who had told me how lost she was when using CS/Adobe Elements and layers.

Here is ON1 with the same photo, but I am editing it to be a black and white photo.

The original shot was pretty unimpressive too. But I wondered how it would look transformed in Black and White. I brightened the yellows, the oranges, in the color enhancer and then shifted it to Black and White and played with the sliders.

Besides ... X marks the spot.

I took this next shot and of course did some more play with it.
Color:

Sigh. It is nice but...

Black and White:

The leaves stand out in this shot, where they really didn't in the color version.

Next up?

I watched a video on how to composite a fantasy scene.

I will have to use both ON1 and CS2 for that. It is a great challenge.

The Night Hikers

Message: "Hey can we go on a night hike?"

It was from my Kenosha Crew. They were coming to visit Rich and I for the weekend.
I typed back: "Yes, of course!"

I had told them how fun it had been to use headlamps and challenge the wooded trials and the creek in the dark.

Years ago my husband and I had redtick hounds and we hunted raccoon at night. I'd always enjoyed our adventures in the dark and rediscovered how fun it actually is to explore trails in the dark.
Things just don't appear the same in the daylight.

After they arrived Friday evening, we gathered up headlamps and flashlights and headed out the door. We headed through the gates and into the cattle's summer pasture.

Photo: Daryl Clausen

We climbed down the steep bank and into the creek bottom. 

Creek Leaping at night is always more fun than in the day time.

During the day one can see exactly where the rocks are to use as stepping stones.

Photo: Daryl Clausen

We got to the ice wall fairly quickly.

The ice wall is way cooler at night...what can I say?

Here the wall was lit up by sticking a headlamp behind the ice.

Day view of approximately the same place.

Friday night's adventure was incredible. The Kenosha Crew loved it.

We used different colored lights in our flashlights to light the ice up from the backside. The kids climbed the ice wall in the dark and slid down it.

Daryl Clausen took this incredible shot of us exploring the ice wall from my Zen rock pile.

We moved on down the creek. We tromped through the snow and headed for the snowmobile crossing. I knew there would be some neat ice formations there.

Amanda and Daryl are rock hounds and they kept finding rocks with Drusy quartz in them. I've learned over the 20 some years of living in this area that even during the most casual walk in the creek or woods in this area, one will always find an interesting rock to pick up.

When we got to the 'Crossing' there were "oohs and ahhhs" as we admired the ice formations that clung to the grasses and roots where the stream had been tamed by the snowmobile club and directed through a culvert.

Photo by Daryl Clausen

Everyone gathered and admired the beautiful ice formations. My cell phone camera didn't do the 'Crossing' any justice what so ever...

But Daryl caught some beauties with his cell phone:

Photo credits to Daryl Clausen

We headed back with the kids and climbed a steep hill to cross the Merry Meadow.
The new snowfall that we'd had earlier this week was wet and heavy. It was frozen and made for difficult walking. If we'd all had snowshoes or had skis, it would have been an easier walk.

Everyone was tired but excited about going exploring the next day to the Ice Cave and the Lost or Secret Valley.

The Kenosha Crew had been hooked by Night Hiking. They definitely wanted to do it again.

Light Play

I couldn't resist taking some time in the afternoon day to set up my Creative Room of Wonders stuff and try some things out.

Morris had to help of course.
I thought I'd take a shot of what I was doing and the simple things that I set up in the spare bedroom to play with the camera and some lights.

So at first I used the method of trying to get a nearly black backround with just the settings in the camera.
It wasn't hard.

I referenced this article by Glyn Dewis: The Invisible Black Blackdrop Photography Technique.

I didn't totally want the backdrop to be black because I don't have the flash equipment. I thought I'd experiment with his idea and see what I could do.

I moved the exposure so that the photo was nearly black. Then I put my camera on a 2 second delay and used an LED flash light to try and light up the flowers from different angles.

There is my hand right there holding up the flash light.

I took several shots and then put them through my old CS2 photomerge.
This is an archiac way of doing things similar to photo stacking and using 'light painting' at the same time. I was able to mask out my hand and then crop the photo.

I ended up with the following.

Well that was nothing to actually write home about. But, I did get an interesting combined shot. It was worth exploring some more.

I did the same thing with some toys.

This was actually quite fun. The hard part is getting a strong enough flashlight and lighting up the right areas. The above shot is probably 4 or 5 shots combined.

Then I thought, why not use a lamp?

Well I did have fun and I was able to edit out the lamp with masking tools.
However I didn't really think I ended up with anything brilliant here either.

So I took this photo into ON1 10.5 for some fun.
Much better...

I then went back to the other flower photo and decided if I could do anything more impressive.
Not sure if this fits that bill or not.
I would need to totally redo this shot as I missed lighting up the top flower and I think no amount of fiddling or editing will fix that.
But I did learn something important about light painting. Don't move the camera until you have reviewed all of the shots.

However, I did go into back to just concentrating on a nice shot of the blue and white cup.
But of course I came up with 3 versions.

When I get some free time, it looks like it is back to the drawing board for me!