Rainbows...

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Today's daily is both inspired, pretty, and scientific. What you're looking at is a macro of a CD (really a DVD) that was put in the microwave for 7 seconds. A special thanks to Vandana and Dianne Ward for their inspiration. I saw their beautiful photos yesterday and was motivated to give it a try myself.

If you're wondering more about why CDs reflect rainbows, here's a geeky explanation that I understood.

I took about 250 pics, and the hardest part was holding everything still so as to not blur the images and actually taking images with the rainbow color that did not also contain a SP. Hi!

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This is the CD after 7 seconds in the microwave on high (my microwave is pretty powerful).  Don't let the chemicals quickly igniting and burning out around 5 seconds cause you to jump too bad!  It's just a small flash.  Turning the fan hood on the stove on is a good idea too as there is a bit of a chemical smell for a few minutes.

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A couple other pics that I liked:

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If you want to give this a try, experiment a lot with the angle you hold the CD relative to the lens.  You can make it look like lightning or veins in the body or cracks in ice or wherever your imagination takes you. Most of all if you try it, have fun!  Even Donnie was getting in on the act!

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My shots were mostly taken under a compact fluorescent light.  It might be worthwhile to go out in the sun or try halogen or some other light source.  Water or maybe oil on top might produce nice results too!

Moody Tree

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It was foggy here yesterday morning, and I stopped to take a picture of a bare tree that always catches my eye on the trip to/from the kids' school.  I got out the tripod because the light was low and I knew I wanted to take some bracketed images.  I thought I might try to process the shot to look like my foggy tree daily from November 2010:

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but I never saw the same potential in  yesterday's tree and shots, so I started experimenting with other processing styles.

Here's the original correctly exposed shot:

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I knew when I took the shot that I was going to want to get rid of the partial tree in the upper left.  Bothers me.  Might not bother you.

Here's the HDR version straightened up a bit and with the left branch removed:

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It's OK, but it doesn't make me feel any emotion.  It looks about like any other outdoor scene I would shoot around here in the winter and pump through Photomatix.  So, I kept going.

This is the tree with a Plaster filter on it:

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I happen to really like that version, but I wasn't sure how the daily community would receive it.  I really struggled on what text, what font, and what location and shape for the text.  I was about to get really frustrated.

I decided to see if I liked what any of the filters in Color Efex Pro would do.  Here's what I call the 'blue' version:

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I love blue (and red), and the colors here really work for me.  There were about 5 filters on this in Color Efex Pro and I didn't keep track of which ones.

I wanted to try a texture, and I kept going. Here's the blue version with a texture:

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This shot didn't have a lot of negative space, but I think I like the texture with it anyway.

But then I thought I'd see what B&W looked like, and then I felt like that was the one.  It's rare for me to do a B&W conversion and feel like there's any depth to the tones of my shot.  I guess all those fancy filters and colors before the B&W conversion helped.

You can tell me which one you like best or how you think you would have set about pp'ing the photo.  I'd be interested to hear.

I Love You

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Every once in a while I like to pull out my LED color changing base and one of the glass cubes that goes on it and create a picture.  I was at the Dollar Tree store earlier in the week, and bought the glass cube that I used for today's daily.  Two years ago, I created this image from one of the cubes:

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Here's the background of today's shot before I altered the color:

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I rotated it, cropped it to 8X10, and used Color Efex Pro and Color Variations in Elements to adjust the color to my liking.

Here's the original text picture:

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As you can tell, I straightened, cropped, cleaned up the dust, and altered the color.  I had taken about 30 pics  of the cube catching various colors from the LED color changing base, and then I set about picking the most sharp one to work with.

I was going to stick with a dark/black image again, but when I Inverted the image, I really liked the colors and decided to use that version this time around.

There's a simple border and drop shadow around the center image to give it some depth.

Of course there are many other ways I could have packaged the original image up keeping it mostly black or inverting it.  Tons of different color tints or frames.  After trying a few combinations, it was time to pick one.

Winter Hues

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I really didn't want to post a picture of ragweed as my daily today, but I thought this was the best shot of the ones I quickly took on a photo drive down my favorite dirt road yesterday.

Here's the original:

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Here's the texture I overlayed over it:

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I did not desat the colors this time.

I also took and worked on this barn shot which I spent some time processing last night:

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It's a 3 shot HDR processed with Photomatix, and then I applied the Orton Action which I downloaded from The CoffeeShop Blog.

Here's the original:

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Like the last winter barn scene I shot, it's just too full of branches and clutter:-(  I'll keep trying.

It's All in the Hands!

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Donnie is patiently working with Johnny to put together an Erector Crane set that he gave him for Christmas.  It's heartwarming to see them sitting at the table finding the pieces and carefully adding them to the progress to far.  I think it makes for a neat picture with Johnny's little hands and Donnie's big hands working together as a team.

Here's a picture of what the crane will look like.  Northern Hydraulics had a much better price just before Christmas!

Crane progress so far:

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Johnny and Donnie:

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For a little boy that needed PT for help gripping a pencil and using his scissors, he's doing a great job working with those small nuts thanks to Donnie's patience.

In the background Joey and I were working on the final stage of his Lego X-Wing fighter ship.  All the wings are done, and we are working on the cockpit.  A picture of that for another day!

The weatherman promised sunny skies by 2PM today.  One can only hope...

My second chemo treatment yesterday went without incident. I just hate the IV in my hand!

A put up a second blog today that talks about formatting urls for use in SmugMug picture captions.  If you're interested, it's here.

Linking to URLs on SmugMug

Lately I have seen a lot of broken 'other photo' url links in SmugMug DailyPhotos picture captions due to them containing the pound sign (#) in them.  I'm not going to delve into why that happens.  But suffice to say, if you paste a url into your daily photo comments that contains a pound sign, clicking on it fails, and folks have to copy/paste the link into another browser window to go to your linked picture.

Example of a url that breaks:
http://fotomom.smugmug.com/Nature/January-2012/20844772_Mzb9HP#!i=1661913395&k=67SgMJs

If you are willing to turn on the Share option for your gallery, you can use the 'Get a Link' option or the 'Shorten this Link' option to get around this.  In my blog each day, I use 'Get a Link' and put the Small version in my post using the Link icon on blogger.  That lets me specify the text of the link  If you use 'Shorten this link', you still see a url but it is as you guessed.much shorter. You can past it just like that or use the Link icon with it too.

Get a Link:

Share a Link:

If you just don't want to turn on the Share option, or your link is not SmugMug related, you can still format a pretty link for a url yourself.  The HTML behind the link is pretty simple:  It all boils down to an HTML tag that looks like this:



(Do you have any idea how hard it is to put an HTML tag in an HTML document so it will show up just as text?  Grrr....  I had to put it in as an image file:-)

You can replace the url with your url (the one on the browser bar for your picture) and then replace the wording for the link (SmugMug in this case) with your desired text.  Be very careful not to mess with the double quotes on left and right carrot symbols (<>).

Link to the pictures in this post.

I hope this is helpful.  E-mail me or leave a comment if you have questions.  For me, it's all about which one of these methods is fastest since I do this a lot and am trying not to be too lazy to format things so they are easier on the eye.

Galactic Stars

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I only took a few pics of the boys making Valentine's Day cards yesterday, and I didn't think any of them worth sharing as a daily. I didn't even pull them off the camera yet:-( My daily is an intentionally blurred shot that I took at Marbles Kids Museum on Saturday along with a water starburst shot that I took back in January of 2010 which I used as a texture overlay. I like the colors and think it's cheery on a cloudy January Monday.

Original background cropped to 8X10:

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Original star field cropped to 8X10:

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Something Fishy

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The pictures I took during yesterday's trip to Marbles Kids Museum were all about geometric shapes and textures.  I did take some fun pics of the kids, but I also spent a lot of time trying to scope out things regular visitors to the museum might not notice.

My daily is one of the fish in their big fish tank.  Art inspired me to try a tank shot when he posted one from a tank at a restaurant last week.  I spent some time with the clone tool cleaning up spots on the glass that showed up in the dark area above the fish.  I ran Noiseware on it and adjusted the contrast and then did a crop to 8X10 taking away just a bit of the image.

This shot is of a girder in the ceiling near the Around Town play area.  I guess there was an extra amount of spotlight coming through that one hole to cause the ghosting effect.  This is a digital zoom, so it has a lot of grain, but in this case I think it makes the girder look like something more than what it is.

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The boys enjoyed building in the block area.  Johnny came up with this fill the hole design all by himself:-)  I took one with and without his hand and liked this one better.

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Of course at Marbles there are a lot of marbles.  The building incorporates them inside and out.  I just wish they were lit up better and closer.

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Out in the garden area, there were quite a few of this solar powered walkway lights.  I love gazing globes small and big!

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The railing is a circle, and the opening looks down from the 2nd floor to the first floor lobby.  I liked the reflection and tried to capture some interest with those passing by on the other side.  They are in the Millennium Falcon style window enjoying the view of Moore Square.

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This is a close-up of a tree through a glass window.

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And this is the spin art activity that they had going on in their art area.

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Here are my boys doing what they do best at the museum...playing and having fun...  That shot of Johnny lower left is way cool.  I was very far away, and you can still see his eye through the pretend telescope lens.  The shot is not cropped, but it is 35x optical zoom to get that close to him.  I am enjoying the better zoom and lower light capabilities of the Canon SX40 HS.

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I'll leave you with one more shot because I just love the Millennium Falcon window.  I sure wish the railing behind me while taking the window shot did not show up in my picture!  If it hadn't, this would be my daily!

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