Vacation in Colorado

 

Last weekend my husband and I went skiing with his family at Copper Mountain, CO. Needless to say, Colorado has amazing photo opportunities that are not remotely present in central Kentucky. Unfortunately, on the one day that I chose to take my nice camera to the mountain, it snowed like crazy in the afternoon when I wanted to shoot. Since snow droplets were rapidly melting all over my camera, I didn't get far out of the lodge, but I did manage to get this photo of the skis and snowboards rack, which I thought looked pretty cool in B&W. I have also recently started learning about layer blending modes in Photoshop. For this photo, I copied the background layer and used the screen blending mode with opacity around 70%. Then I tried a new way of converting to B&W--added a black solid color adjustment layer and used a color blend mode at 100%. I was worried the photo might look flat with this B&W conversion, but I think the screened background layer helped maintain good contrast. Thoughts?

I also just finished reading Bryan Peterson's book Understanding Exposure, so I've been working with different creative methods of proper exposure. Freezing motion was particularly neat. I was surprised at how easily I got this cool photo of the airplane's propeller blade, since it was spinning so fast I couldn't even see it! I used the hard light blending mode to boost the contrast in this shot. Tried to reduce the noise, but when I couldn't figure out how to do that successfully, I decided the noise looked kinda cool.

 

I also played around with implied motion. We had a layover at Detroit Metro Airport, which has an underground connection between concourses that I affectionately call the Psychedelic Tunnel. I think I actually got this one slightly by accident. I was trying to adjust for proper exposure in the low light, and my shutter speed was so slow that it produced a motion blur, aided by my standing on the moving walkway. I used the color dodge blending mode at 30% to add extra contrast.

I have several other good photos from the trip, but it's late now, so I'll post them tomorrow.

I know I wimped out on the daily posts, but I feel like I've had much more time lately to read my manual and other books and tutorials; and from these photos I think I can tell that my creativity is starting to emerge, and I'm definitely learning how to handle my camera better. All feedback is welcome!