Clicked this on a foggy morning at the Half Moon Bay. There were people having fun running around, and I was having fun clicking them..
The photograph itself was grainy, and when selectively blurring some areas didn’t make it better, I decided to retain, and add on to, the graininess. I kinda like the resulting effect…
This lake just outside the Preah Khan temple at Cambodia. It was the middle of morning when we passed beside it, but then, I was playing with the colors in the picture later, and I absolutely loved it when I tinted the blue with yellow. This golden sky makes my heart soar with joy in a way that the original blue sky wasn’t able to, and I just don’t feel any shame or guilt for tampering with the colors so! 🙂
For SL-Week: Reflection, and Weekly Photo Challenge: Jubilant.
A traditional South Indian wedding. The priest runs the couple through a series of rituals, while the relatives of the bride and groom shower the couple with blessings. get together, catch up on gossip and try to pair up ‘eligible’ singles they know. Weddings everywhere are the same, I guess…? 😉
I applied some blurring and solarization effects to the photograph, mainly because it was a slightly old, low-resolution image with not-so-great colors, and also because it was fun playfully distort the picture while still maintaining the spirit of the ceremony. Distorted picture or not, the bride is the most eye-catching person at a wedding!
For SL-Week: Wedding.
Clicked at Kompong Phluk, Tonle Sap lake, Cambodia.
Kompong Phluk is a ‘floating’ village built on stilts, and tourists can pay to be taken around on a boat ride through the place. I was not a huge fan of the experience; the village certainly does not seem to reap any benefits of the money paid by visitors. Anyway, here is a photograph of a local woman rowing about going about her chores nonchalantly. 🙂
This picture was kinda blurred, but I didn’t want to throw it away — I really love the half-turned torso of the subject. To make the photograph usable, I decided to make the background monochrome and apply a selective blur, and highlight the woman and her boat in the foreground. However, the varied blurriness required of the elements made my first attempt look weird and unnatural. So I started working with the boat and the woman separately. Frankly, I’ve forgotten the myriad effects I played around with. I remember going crazy with the Colors tool for the boat, and using edge detection and softening and various blend modes and transparencies for the layers. The final changes I made were smudging, shading and healing the subject to make her blend in with the background.
For SL-Week: Women. Happy Women’s Day!
Vacations are for fun and dancing. This is one way the both can be combined, I guess — My friends imitating the dancing Apsaras carved over the lintel of the door behind them at Preah Khan, Cambodia.
I wanted to attempt one of those paper-tear effects for my friends’ torsos, showing the photo ‘tearing off’ revealing a differently processed version of the same photo below the torn portion — but decided to post something simpler until I get better at the paper-tear one. This photo still has a differently processed version in the middle. I’ll call this Stage-1 of paper-tear effect. 😉
This is at Banteay Srei, Cambodia. This temple is dedicated to Lord Shiva, and is built of red sandstone, which gives it its beautiful color. I experimented with HDR for this picture, and though I’m not usually a fan of HDR that is at the extreme end, I can’t believe that the more extreme version was the one I liked for this temple! I still don’t really dig the way it looks at the upper edges of the temple. The sky made the edges jarring, and further processing made it seep into them; I retained the seepy version. (I think I should take a tripod with me on my next vacation. Or maybe I should inlay my own sky. 🙂 ) I’m blown away by the details in the rest of the structure, though.
Eventually, I tried this HDR version on a few other architecture photographs that I brought back from that vacation; I liked some, and some I didn’t. I’m still experimenting…
Festival season is in full swing here in India, what with Navaratri recently concluded and Diwali around the corner. Most of these festivals have religious backgrounds and overtones to them, but one thing they all have in common is the food. Sweet treats, savoury treats, I’m looking forward to them all! 😀
Clicked using a phone camera app outside a restaurant on a sunny, windy day. The faraway lines of buildings that get reflected here weren’t click-worthy at all, but I thought the waves and ripples on the water made all reflections featureless yet interesting. 🙂
I applied a light touch of painterly effect with another app to get this final picture. (The results of painterly effects make me sigh, wishing I could paint like that, but I then console myself since I can at least apply painterly effects using these apps.)
It’s the final week of the One Four Challenge for this month (we work on one photograph of our choosing and present a different version of it each week.) I’d wanted to play around more, but I didn’t really have much time last week, so I finally decided to just focus more on the Forager Duck itself. The result –
I zoomed in on the duck and applied a light oil painting effect for this version. I love how the beautiful plumage of the duck looks here!
Since this is the final week for this month’s challenge, I’ll also show the original photograph…
… and the earlier three versions for this month, so you can decide which, amongst all five Foragers, you like most –
 
 
You could even vote for one if you’d like –
For more One-Four Challenge submissions, please check out the comments section of Robyn’s post for this week, or search for the tag ‘One Four Challenge’ in WordPress.
It’s week 3 of the One Four Challenge for this month; it’s hosted by Robyn Gosby, and we present four weekly versions of one photograph (of our choosing) over one month. My chosen photograph is a Forager Duck, of which I’ve presented ‘glowy‘ and muted-color versions so far. This week, I went monochrome, so I could submit it to the Monochrome Madness series that Leanne Cole hosts. 🙂
For this version, I slightly blurred the surroundings using a combination of radial- and zoom-blurred layers in Hard Light mode before applying a sepia effect, resulting in softer waves that still show some reflections, and a comparitively stronger focus on the duck.
For more One-Four Challenge submissions, please check out the comments section of Robyn’s post for this week, or search for the tag ‘One Four Challenge’ in WordPress.
For more Monochrome Madness submissions, you might want to head over to Leanne’s post.
It’s week 2 of the One Four Challenge for May. Robyn Gosby hosts this challenge on her blog, and we work on a photograph of our choosing, presenting a different version of it every week for four weeks of the month.
I’ve chosen a Forager Duck this month, and my version for this week is a muted-color one.
For this version, I played with color levels on a duplicated layer of the original image. I changed the ranges of the color channels in the layer to make it appear washed-out, and set the duplicated layer to 50% opacity in Color mode.
For more submissions, please check out the comments section of Robyn’s post for this week, or search for the tag ‘One Four Challenge’ in WordPress.
Grand Canyon, Arizona
On my road trip with friends, we spent a quiet day (or at least most part of it) at Grand Canyon. I tried clicking pictures, but capturing the sheer enormity of the view in front of me in a photograph seemed to me like gathering an ocean in a teacup. How long the Colorado river (and co.) must have slowly eroded layer after layer of rock to give form to this canyon… How strong the forces of nature are compared to us puny humans… Reflecting on my thoughts from this canyon certainly gives me a different perspective on everyday wonders of nature as well.
I cropped the image in 5:3 to embody some sense of the vastness one associates with Grand Canyon. I also applied a light Lomo effect that highlighted the reds and blues in the image.
Half a photograph 