As a kid with blue eyes and blonde hair, everything I wore seemed to be the color blue. So much blue! Too much blue! I really didn’t like it after awhile, but these days it is probably next to greens as a color I enjoy.
Looking through my photo archives this morning, I found a number of pictures I took in the local botanical garden one spring – a brilliantly blue sky with no clouds, but branches blooming and leafing out. This is when I love blue!
Meanwhile, blue denim sashiko continues!
Besides doves and finches at the feeders, we have gotten squirrels and hawks and hummingbirds. It can be noisy or silent, the soft coo of a dove, and just funny to watch the finches jockeying for position to get to the seed. Beep! Beep! Beep!
Every year I plant flowers in pots and in the little front garden bed outside the studio window. I let the roses alone along one side of the house, and the glads and fig tree, too. The front bed reseeds itself, and at times I add to it. The side patio, though, is where the fun often is to be found. There are some permanent plants, such as bulbs which return every spring. Then there are herbs and flowers and tomatoes (although not this year). Here are some of the lovelies I have in bloom today.
And there you have a few. Some last a long time, others fade away in days. The joy of a garden, the cycle of life, the fragrance of flowers, the hum of bees – add a bit of sun, a good book, a comfy chair and birdsong, and a slice of heaven to be had and held.
Software updates and new versions come out on a regular basis. If you are diligent, you learn the newer versions and discard the old by uninstalling them. Sometimes the newer versions have features added and older ones removed for this reason or that. Usually I just install things and play. Today I decided it was time to really get my proverbial s*** together with regards to Lightroom Classic CC and On1 Photo Raw 2023.
In Lightroom up to the 2021 version of Photo Raw I could use the different modules of On1’s software individually. After that, no. I decided to get into the 2023 release of Photo Raw and figure it out. The first thing I did was to import a bazillion of presets into Photo Raw 2023. That took easily a few hours. Each preset group had to be imported individually. Argh! Why batch imports cannot be done, I have no idea – may be it can be, but I have no idea how!!
Anyway, done with preset importing, I started trying to figure out how I could get the best usage out of my LR and Photo Raw 2023 to edit by exporting an image from LR to Photo Raw. I found a great video, for Photo Raw 2022, not with the individual modules as before, but it works.
If you have struggled with LR and On1, this presents a viable option. It is not as good as the individual modules of the 2021 and earlier versions of Photo Raw, but it works. There are ways to batch edit in both LR and On1, and I do need to learn those as well.
While I was playing with On1 Photo Raw 2023, I started exploring the sky replacement element. It is really fun! Of course, you need to have some sense of matching the sky with the photo or it can look odd, but there are some adjustments it seems that you can make while importing a sky into a photo – ones that adjust the foreground for instance. If you have water, you can put in a reflection. You can also expand and shrink your new sky to a degree, as well as move the horizon and so on. Again, more study is needed.
And here is just one of the pictures I played with. Below is one with an original sky – I downloaded it from Pixabay, a website with a lot of free photos for use. Per the description, this is taken in Malibu, CA. Those clouds are not common here – winter storms are usually when we see them.
And here it is with a tornado and rain – not something you are likely to see here in California unless the world really changes!
And that is how I spent today – updating photo software, playing around, and trying to join the 21st century with AI and photography. I like the sky thingy – has potential.
And now – dinner and a walk and something other than computers . . .
Yesterday afternoon I did a lot of sewing and running around to the point I so tired of the house and machines and tasks that the best thing to do was run away.
I do that a lot.
At about 5 p.m. I decided to snag the Canon G7X Mark II as all I wanted was a point and shoot and a brisk hike along a trail with trees and rocks and bugs and poison oak. It was perfect! The hills beyond the little canyon where the trail is were still covered with golds and lavender from this past winter’s rain, and alongside the trail was a profusion of mustard, monkey flower, salvia, penstemon, sunflowers and a number of flowers I don’t know. For two hours I ran around, ignoring my wifely duties of dinner (we had leftovers, so J. was fine!) and getting my mind elsewhere.
Too easy to forget about the natural world when the unnatural one demands so much time. The shade, light, sun, shadows, were not simple to get in a photo, and the colors just got burnt out in the glare or lost in the dark. In the end, a black and white with lots of subtlety seemed the best way to express the beauty of the hike.
