Car Show Time Of Year.

It's that time of year again. Time for some car show pix. I'll be adding more throughout the week.

This is a color photo, manipulated with the old photo effect in Gimp 2.8, then desaturated. Going for an old skool look but the modern cars in the background kind of ruin it. Anyway , here it is.

Old skool fail due to the modern cars in the background. You get what I was going for here though. I love the old rat rods !

A bunch of old rat rods displayed at a car show. I wish the modern cars weren't in the background, I think this image could of been really cool. It was a fun manipulation none the less.

Putting Some Photos To Use.

Its been about a year and a half since I started this hobby. In that time I've accumulated a lot of photos. Some photographs are good, some not so much. I started wondering what I should do with all these photos I've captured.

I uploaded a few to my http://morguefile.com/creative/newaeondesign. My policy with morguefile is that with every image I download and use , I upload an image to give back to the community. This isn't required, but I thought it would be a good personal policy. Currently I think I have 8 images there. If your on morguefile click on the link and follow me .

Autumn in Western New York. One or the images currently found in my morguefile account. You can use the image for just about anything and the license agreement can be found with the image.

I uploaded a few to my flickr.com. I'm new to flickr and just started using it. Most of my images are rights reserved and I watermark them, but I put a few others up under CC license. I tend to put my better shots and things I'm experimenting with on flickr.

One of the last images I took. This is one of my favorites and I uploaded it to flickr.

This barely even covers the amount of photos I've taken in the last year and a half. What good is a hobby if you can't make good use of it ? What to do ? I decided to merge 2 hobbies. I love learning Spanish, and I love taking photographs so I merged these two hobbies together and created a Learn Spanish blog. Enter mi-palabra-del-dia.com

One of the images being used on mi-palabra-del-dia.com. I love the way the dog looks like he's smiling in this picture. Not a really great photo, but more than acceptable for what it's being used for.

This has worked out really well for a couple reasons. 1) I now have motivation to take pictures of everything and use them on the Spanish language blog. 2) Even the pictures that aren't that great (most of them) I can put to use on the Spanish language blog. Every image gets labeled in Spanish now and uploaded to my blog. Well not every image but you get the point. 3) Last but not least I can use the blog as a makeshift portfolio of my graphic design work, and photography work to show to my New Aeon Design customers. I need to start putting a portfolio together.

Anyway, this has really helped me to get motivated, take more pictures, and get my work out there. That's really what this post is about. Finding things to keep you motivated, keep you snapping pictures, and of course putting those images to use !

Summer Flowers !

I love summer time photography ! In the summer time it seems like there's always something to get a picture of . All the light, the colors, the shapes, both in nature, and man made structures. Everything just seems to pop in the summer time.

Some blue flowers photographed in a Japanese style garden. I like the light and color in this image. One of the first images I've taken that I'm really happy with.

My photography related blog.

I think this is going to become my photography related blog. I just don't have the time to make this blog what I wanted it to be. I don't want to get rid of it either though. I think this is just going to be a place where I post some pics, maybe link up some tutorials, occasionally write something and add youtube videos.

I wanted so much more, but it just doesn't look like its going to happen. Things will slowly start to change around here. To the few people that follow this blog, thanks for following and hope you all stick around for the changes.

I'm going to try and post a few images a week, and maybe some stuff from other people as well. Enjoy.  

Happy Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day

Buffalo Skyline Edit

Playing around with Gimp I tried something different and I really liked the effect. The image shown is two images layered. The first image is the original, I adjusted the brightness and contrast a bit. I then duplicated that image and to the new layer I used colors/auto/equalize. This brought out the really cool colors in the clouds and a little more dimension in the buildings. I then dropped the opacity of that layer to 75%.

When the image was equalized though, some pixelization formed around the clouds. The only way I could remedy this was to lower the opacity of the equalized layer and then an image resize from 3872 x 2592  to 640 x 429.

I need to play with this effect a bit more.

Buffalo NY 2014. Interesting effect using multiple layers in Gimp with the equalize function and playing around with the opacity of the top layer.

A Day In The Park- Lighthouse

Towards the end of last summer I spent a day in the park. I took photos of everything I could possible find. It was a beautifully sunny day with wispy clouds in a blue sky. I came across this lighthouse and really liked the way the pond reflected the lighthouse. What you see in the background though is a combination of real and airbrushed clouds.

I found some cloud brushes, and played around with them a bit. I added some clouds to the image. I believe these clouds are the cloud brushes by Blazter which can be downloaded here.

After playing around with image manipulation software, and adding clouds, and sun, and light, etc, I can't help but wonder how much of any image is really what the photographer seen. So many images we see in magazines are illusions of reality.

Lighthouse in the park, artificial clouds added with the cloud brushes by Blazter. Download link in article.