sun

The Sun is coming

Featured text to be added later.

sun

Kaz at sunrise

 

A shot of my Golden Retriever, Kaz. He’s a poser as you can tell.
Seriously though, it’s very hard to capture him as he doesn’t stay still for more than a few seconds. At just 3 years old he’s is so full of energy especially when I take him out for his walk! I reckon he could keep going all day long!

But luckily on one of my early morning expeditions I caught him here. He was standing up on a mound near a pond while the Sun was coming up and the sky was a wonderful yellowy-orange. I think he might have heard a train coming and so went into ‘alert mode’ – Kaz loves to chase the trains, but so far he’s never caught up with one.

Again this is Edenbridge and at a place called Prettymans Pond. I’m not sure what it’s called that but it’s fantastic little pond and I’ve spent many an hour here practicing my photography and taking shots of the pond and the trees in every way I can think of. I’ve found that by going back to the same place over and over again you eventually see different angles for shots and find different ways of capturing the same subject. I’ve also tried to go here at different times of the day in different weather conditions. It’s been very interesting to see the changes these bring and I’ve certainly learnt how to look at things with a ‘photographer’s eye’.

This is a slightly adjusted photo (see below for original). I’ve cropped the top and left a little and increased the saturation throughout. Also I’ve lightened Kaz a little as he was a bit too dark. What does everyone think? I still think the sharp foreground branches are a little distracting?

In the process of creating this photo I thought of two questions:

Question 1: What is the best way to convert an image from Photoshop (PSD, TIFF) to JPEG? What I normally do is save the PSD as a TIFF then go into ACDSee and convert it there at max. quality to a JPEG (thus keeping the EXIF data). But this photo really highlights a problem (or two) I’ve noticed in that converting to JPEG reduces the saturation and darkens the brightness. Is there a better way to convert to JPEG to keep the exact tone of the image as well as the EXIF info?

Question 2: I had to refine and touch up the selection of Kaz in Photoshop as left alone he stuck out too much and his hair (especially his underneath) had a nasty line where one part of the image was dark+saturated and the other was bright+lightened. What’s the best way to blend these areas? I used the smudge tool on the selection layer and the result seems OK but is there a better way?

The original photo has been printed in the UK newspaper, Kent & Sussex Courier on 01-Feb-2008 (my first print!) and made it to onto Flickr’s Explore on Jan 8, 2008 at #434. The scan of the newspaper print is below:

Blog entry at Dark Matter Magazine is here.