Grilln'

Not a bad way to spend the end of the day.

Light

Light falling on my son's toy box
Taken With HDR Camera+
Edited with Pixlr Express

conversation piece or just a dust collector

I have a couple of old cameras on a bookshelf in the living room. I have two Polaroid Land Cameras, another Polaroid, a Brownie, an old Canon 35mm and a Panasonic point and shoot, my first camera besides the one I made out if an oatmeal canister in elementary school.
I bought a couple of them with the intentions of using them but have never gotten around to it, digital is so easy.
Originally I wanted to try to put some orthofilm in the land cams and brownie and try to make an exposure that way... I still might try one day. But know you can buy film for the Polaroids again.
It is food to have dreams and ambitions it what you could call a Pipedream.

Playtime

Mornings are better than ever now. Every morning I get up with my son and have a few hours with him before I have to start my work day.
He gets to roll and now crawl around on the floor and play and I get to enjoy my morning cup of coffee and roll around on the floor with my son.

Night Lavender

By the front door of my building is this patch (usually overgrown) of lavender. I pass it every time I walk out the door but tonight it caught my eye.

Painterly

For my wife's birthday I gave her the gift of a photo session. The catch was it was just a photo session with me not a professional photographer, (SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT) like Garrett Ross. Garrett photographed our wedding, and did Laura's maternity photos and my son's newborn photos... we really like his work.

Back to the photos I took. Laura came to me with a Mary Cassatt image and said she wanted this. I believe she was talking more of the spirit of the image, a mother and her baby, but I decided to try to make the images a little more painterly. I am not trying to recreate Cassatt's style just give the images a little bit of a painted look. That being said here are two versions of the same image with slightly different effects. Really the second one just has one extra effect the first doesn’t have.

I found a tutorial on painterly effects in Photoshop in where you duplicate the image change its blend mode, I used soft light, and apply a motion blur at 90 degrees and crank the distance way up to the three or four hundreds. Then you repeat this two more times. On one you change the angle to -45 degrees and the other to 45 degrees play around with the distance for both. If you turn the first duplicate layer to a smart object and then duplicate that in makes it a little faster.

For the second image I also duplicated the original layer again changed its blend mode to overlay and inverted it and then applied a Gaussian blur filter cranked all the way up. I found this trick in a tutorial for increasing contrast in an image. Once you invert the image the blur filter is actually sharpening the image. So I am blurring the image with three layers and then resharpening it with a fourth. Might be a little counter intuitive but it brightened the image up a little.

Which one?

 It is always a battle between my wife and myself when it comes to Black & White vs Color... well that is a little over the top. She generally likes color and I want to feel artsy so I go with black and white.

For these two images I think she is right. Well at least for the first image I am not sure the second one is good either way.
I thought the dark brick and white mortar would be a good candidate for black & white but it might just all run together.