More for not putting them in portfolios, to be specific. But what was even worse… photos of CATS.

So here is kitty in the window, or cat behind the curtain. Hey, I know the images are nothing special, they are just my take on the suggestion to not shoot cats. Cats are for Facebook I hear.

Five Minute Tutorial

First we start with two images, one, the base photo, and the other the texturizing image. Our goal is to create an old-time postcard that you can fool your friends into believing you made a great find, at least those friends that know little about photography and even less about antique postcards. It is all for fun. I am showing my desktop so you can click to see the settings I make in Photoshop. Just click to enlarge the images.

Of course what better to recreate an old image than one of Niagara Falls. I will be purposely making this tutorial a little more difficult so you can see a process. Starting with picking an original image that is not in landscape mode and a texture that is. You will see why in a moment.

The texture is a lake bottom with swimming fish. Again, not a typical texture to use, but the color is something we are after for an old world look. What we do is have both images open in Photoshop, then we just drag the texture into the document of Niagara Falls. It will position itself in a layer above the image of the Falls. Simple so far.

Now see that they don’t fit each other? No problem. We just grab the transform handles of the texture and enlarge the image. This allows us to move the image to a better textural pattern. See I enlarged and moved it over to the left. Also notice how the image picked up age with the yellow/orange color. We change the Layer Blending mode to Overlay and it blends with the Falls image below. It still retains the texture too, most noticeably in the sky.

This is how to add textures to photos, but it doesn’t look like much yet, but wait. We duplicate the original layer and change the Layer Blending mode of the Duplicate to Multiply. Now we are getting somewhere.

Getting better with greater contrast and saturation, just like those old saturated printed postcards.  But, this also made some parts of the image very dark. We can fix that with a layer mask. Click to add a layer mask and with the Brush tool, paint black on the mask itself. This will reveal some of the layer below which makes the lower left of the image much brighter.

A few steps below in the Layers panel, you see the layer mask applied. The image below has the area in question revealed. This step becomes unnecessary when we crop it to postcard size though. But masking is another thing you can see the effect, so I did it anyway.

But are we done? Nope. This step will add some real interest. Draw a selection very roughly around the image on the Duplicate layer.

When you have your marching ant selection, we are going to do a step you might not know. Select>Refine Edge. It opens the window below. We push the radius slider all the way up as shown and add a little contrast. How’s this look?

Click OK and what you get is the refined selection. Where did our white go? We invert the selection with Select>Inverse.

Now for the fun part. Hit Option/Delete (Alt/Backspace) to fill the active selection with black. We can’t leave it this way so…

We lower the opacity of the layer to give an aged look and darkened edges. I added a layer mask to this layer to mask some of the ‘frame’ at the top of the image but this is not necessary.  But, we don’t have a postcard yet. So we reduce the size of the frame layer to postcard size. This eliminates the bright blue sky too.

Using this as the overall size, crop the entire image.

In this image below, I first sharpened the image to increase the definition of the roughness. I created a New Layer and filled it with black. I then added Noise to the black layer. Filter>Noise>Add Noise. I changed the Layer Blending Mode to Overlay on the Noise layer and reduced the opacity of this layer. It gives an old film camera graininess to the image. I can further age it with torn edges and paper folds, but I think this makes a nice old postcard. Enlarge to see the graininess, but I kinda prefer it without.

Add some text and you have your Greetings From Niagara Falls. The postcard even has that metallic sheen seen on the ‘period’ cards they sell in the gift shops around the Falls.

Just for fun, I left a big fish swimming across the Falls. I wanted to see if anybody noticed.  Because it is distracting from the image, I would have eliminated this if this really was going to be a postcard. Content Aware anyone? I did on it on the GWGT post Monthly Weather Calendar – March 2012.

A cropped image

I have been thinking (and what better place to contemplate than by a large body of water under a cloud filled sky) about a post that was made a little while back that had a preference for ‘real’ gardens and not ‘airbrushed’ gardens. I found the short remark rather telling in so many ways. I guess it left me wondering what is wrong with a well-taken image showing a garden in its best light?

Honestly, I prefer an image someone took a little time to compose in camera, an image of a garden of which they may be quite proud. I prefer a garden that makes a pretty presentation to a neighborhood. Don’t you? I highly doubt that anyone ‘airbrushes’ a post image either. You know, taking objectionable things out and putting in desirable additions like they do for magazines.  Sure everyone has an idea of their ideal garden, and that surly differs from person to person, but seriously, photo manipulations for a blog post?

I can do wonders with Photoshop given an ample amount of time, but I usually post images on GWGT straight from the camera.  These images are not for sale and I post so often, where would I find the time, especially with nothing to gain from it? But if you read on, there really is not so much a gain, as a detriment in posting poor quality images, according to professional photographers and bloggers.

When you are doing a low resolution image for the web, there is no point in enhancing 99.99% of the images. You may have only one in a batch of thousands that is one worth a ‘holy crap that’s good’ response. And to have an image like that, you need to either have enormous luck, or great photography skills and knowledge. This type of image deserves the time of editing if it is necessary at all, and should be printed, not just seen small on a blog anyway.

Did you ever really analyze why full, wide angle images of landscapes don’t look so hot on blogs, even when taken by a skilled photographer? It is because a post is just too small a place to display images like that. They lose all their power. Print them big on a wall and see the difference. On to gripe two….

Then there are other bloggers who get their panties in a knot over other web viewers ‘stealing’ their images. Another chuckle on this one too. I upload larger images than most and have had people tell me they downloaded them, printed them and framed them. Does this bother me? Absolutely not. Now if they were profiting off my work then I might have a say on that. But read on and see why stealing a blog image is not worth the effort if printing is your goal.

I was reading another blog post a few days ago of a professional photographer that I quite admire. He is known worldwide and sells his images for quite a pretty penny. But he has a post up that headlines, Go Ahead, Steal this Photo and Make Prints. And he means it. He even lets you post them on your blog with his permission. I did ‘steal’ an image just to see what resolution they were posted at and at what size. If you want to know, it is 72 ppi and a size of 900×586 px. That is an image 12 inches by a little over 8 inches.

I was very curious. I ‘stole’ one of my own images and it was 72 ppi and over 11 inches by almost 17 inches at 800 x 1208 px. Guess what size that prints at with a professionally sized 300 pixels per inch (ppi) resolution? 4 inches by 2.667 inches. Not so great huh? So people stealing images at 72 ppi are in for a lousy image if printed at 8 by 12.  You can resample in Photoshop, but how many people stealing images have this application?

I want you to go see his work, so I am sending you there rather than posting his ‘stolen’ image. But that leads to another panty twisting issue, gripe number three.

Using web images that YOU do not take in a post. I find that a little anus pinching of a remark that I see on a lot of blogs. If it is on the web, it is going to end up somewhere else. Pinterest anyone??? Google Images???? Here is a take on Pinterest too. At least the images always link back!

I have no problem seeing my photos around the web like this. As long as they are not making money, maligning my work, and are crediting my image to my blog, who the heck cares. Really. And if you are paranoid about this, here is a place to go check if your favorite capture was stolen. It is a reverse image search app.  My photography work is not so important that this makes a hill of beans anyway. I have had another architect steal and implement a design I did and put my work under his own name, and that is a whole other issue, a legal one too. But a photo?

Gripe four, every image you see is wonderfully stupendous.

But let’s get back to the meat of the matter. Are any images that most of us produce worth stealing? I can say ‘NOT’ emphatically for the most part. Many are good, but not ‘holy crap’ good. Let’s talk about that too. I have never taken a ‘holy crap’ image. Some I might say, ‘Not bad,’ but nothing any more positive.

I think an image that strong takes you on a journey of sorts. Your imagination swirls and you find yourself immersed in the work.

What makes photos stand out is not the technical aspect, it is the feeling and mood. The sense of getting taken where the photographer intends you to be taken, somewhere deep within the image. The viewer becomes engaged in a story.  I can think of a handful of famous images that do that to me and all of them have story, emotion, exceptional mood and extraordinary lighting. But there are plenty of photos in the ‘Oh my, I wish I took that photo’ category, a blog hop to Nat Geo is all it takes for me to have image envy.

In fact, I was reading how if an image lacks the fundamentals of composition, light, form, and color, don’t even bother pressing the shutter. Wow, that means I would never venture to take a photo because it takes experience to get all those right from the camera. But it is good to think about and strive for. And if you extrapolate a bit, many of the same design principles apply to landscape design. If the design does not have the fundamentals of good design then it will never be a ‘holy crap’ garden.

I also read somewhere recently, to not even bother posting an image on the web unless it is the absolute best image you have. Again, there would not be so many bloggers out there shooting photographs if this was doctrine to follow. But that got me thinking too. The web is forever and why post images that are not just so special? I will never get a ‘holy crap’ image, but hope to at least get a few I would be proud to have taken. I decided to put more effort into getting those type of images. I have been working on the fundamentals and after that, hopefully the art. Then I will be Photoshopping my work if it needs the extra punch….

So let’s loosen up fellow bloggers. Don’t take issue with those that Photoshop or spend some time making the composition and angle of view of the garden magazine worthy. They are trying to put out the best quality that they can. Maybe they think their garden is worth it too. I have been reading some posts as of late that have had some alarmist kind of rhetoric, trying to make others worry about stuff like stealing that really is not something much to care about if you are blogging in the first place.

Relax a bit and don’t be so concerned with other bloggers stealing your images either. Get a Creative Commons license. It sets some guidelines. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/, Check out the other licenses too.

I guess I am getting a bit annoyed by a few bloggers that have all this advice to give on stealing images, putting on a watermark (which REALLY ruins any image I am seeing), taking polished photos of too perfect gardens, editing (or not) photos in any manner, or any of the other similar issues. I have even had some email me to chide me on occasion for some of my Photoshop composites on GWGT. My advice to them is learn a bit about what you are talking about, then keep your advice to yourself.

For those of you that like tutorials, I thought you might like one to display your images in their best light, that or present them to clients that might buy them.  This is not a true matting experience, (I could show you that too), but one you can do for online display.  You could print it, but it certainly would not have the three-dimensional appearance of a true matte.

For those of you not able to do this project, I have some pretty animal portraits for you. So let’s get started on our Digital Matte.

Our first step in making the finished art, is to open a Photoshop document 14″ wide by 11″ high at 300 dpi ( or make this 8″ wide and  96 dpi for online use). The background color is the default white, name your project, MatteProject, and click OK.

Next we Place an image as a Smart Object by going to File>Place, then select an image you find on your hard drive. This brings the image in as a smart object. This means the original is not changed in any way, keeping your pixels as the image was created. Or do it the simple way and copy and paste, your preference.

Make a new blank layer below your image layer, this is where your matte will be created. In the Layers Panel, go to the bottom of the panel and select the folded paper looking icon and while holding the Command or Control key, click this radio button and you will get a new blank layer below your image layer, just where you want it.

In this step, on the blank layer, you go to the Rectangular Marquee tool and draw a rectangle roughly around the image like you see here. Don’t worry if it is off-center like shown, we will fix that later by using Photoshop’s Alignment tools.

Next you fill the area you just created with white. It can be any color, but we will try to make this look museum quality for fun.

I went to the little white and black circle icon in the Layers Panel to make an adjustment layer. You choose Solid Color to get the color picker. See the red arrow pointing to the drop down? But you can go to Edit>Fill and get the same color picker. But as an adjustment layer, you can easily change the color of the matte any time since it creates a layer mask. Notice, since I made the matte white, you do not see any thing happening in the document, but you see the mask in the layers panel.

We will add an Inner Shadow to the white mat (Layer 1), our original blank layer, so you will see this layer appear in your document. Go to the bottom of the Layers Panel again, then to  Add Layer Style drop down (fx) and select Inner Shadow. Make the selections as shown in the next illustration. You can change them, but try these first.

You can see we have a believable matte starting to happen.

But if we want to make it look fancy, we make adjustments to the document as shown above, and then add some fancy text. This would be a great way to show your photos to your client’s and friends on your iPad, no?

You can optionally add some text and make adjustments to make it really classy. Here, I picked a color for the text, a golden hue like in the image of the bear above, selected the font Trajan, centered the text, added a layer style of Bevel and Emboss, and adjusted the tracking between the letters.

To adjust tracking, you highlight the string of text (triple click the line of text), then use the key board shortcut, Option Command Right Arrow (Alt Control Right Arrow on a PC). This makes space between the letters. If you add too much, no worry, just use Option Command Left Arrow (Alt Control Left Arrow on a PC), and they grow closer together. Just a tip you likely did not know, but a great one to know.

Lastly, like I mentioned above, we need to align all the layers to center them. Select all the layers by selecting the top one first, then Shift clicking the bottom layer. With them all selected, select the Move tool from the Tools panel. With that tool selected, you get the handy alignment tools as shown in the illustration. It is at the top of the Photoshop document. Select the Align Centers tool and all the layers are perfectly centered.

And our Giraffe portrait is complete. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. I did jump over the text portion rather quickly.

The giraffe below was taken in really low light and if you want to see how to photograph in these kind of conditions, see the post Night Lights in the Garden on Garden Walk Garden Talk.

Images above are taken at the Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens in early October 2011. The bedroom below was at Plantasia in March 2011.

If you are local, think to support ….

For further information….

http://www.nationalgardenfestival.com/Hearts/index.asp

Erway Farms raises deer and I just showed the boys. The girls were asking for a little face time, so I am much obliged.

They are a kissy bunch.

This is Dottie below, a piebald deer.

More kissing….

And more…

Ray, a drop of golden sun

A pretty morning sun start to the day. The creek is just in the background. Garden Walk Garden Talk will have more photos of Dottie. She is a real ham and camera hound. You will love her expressions.

It has been awhile since I posted on GA. I have been very busy working at Erway’s Christmas Tree Adventure in Wilson, New York. I report on the fun and activities on Garden Walk Garden Talk to partially help promote Erway’s Christmas Tree Adventure and, to have their customers read about the what is happening at the Farm. Take a look at the website. I designed it and took many of the photos. You will see other activities and animals at the Farm. I usually have posts on making Christmas wreaths and Kissing Balls, and things like Santa visiting and the tree cutting fun on GWGT.

I took some photos of the deer I would like to share because they are pretty stunning creatures, ones that if they were roaming free, would likely be hanging on a wall by now.

I think this deer is a pretty one and I took a lot of photos of him. He does not have the biggest rack of the deer at the Farm though.

He even gave me a nice pose. This is the walk to the deer pens below. Calling them deer pens seems not accurate because all the deer have large fields filled with trees and grasses. I showed on GWGT how the deer can hide in the brush undetected, just like they can in the wild.

These deer are very tame and the kids can feed them. There are signs that the deer could nip, but I have never had any nipping issues. You can see the white feeding tubes that helps keep little fingers where they belong, on the kid’s hand. I pet and feed the deer when the owners give me fruit for them.

This deer below is on loan to the Farm. He is a real sweetie. He is a small bodied deer with very large antlers. The owner told me that the rack is very heavy and the deer will lay the rack on the ground while resting. Here he is not doing that, but I have seem him lay them down.

The next deer is named Moe. I was walking by while he was way back in his pen. I and all the customers were watching him because he appeared to be in a trance for about ten minutes. He was just staring and his back-end was swaying side to side. He appeared to have his hind legs together, barely balancing himself.

I had to ask why he was doing this and found out that they have tarsal glands in their back legs at the hock area that they rub together.  They may use these glands during rutting season. These glands consist of a tuft of elongated hairs that is underlaid by an area of sebaceous glands. These enlarged glands secrete a fatty substance, lipid, that adheres to the long hairs of the leg.

This image comes from NY Antlers Outdoors website. I showed it so you can see what I am talking about. They also helped me with some of the information I am posting.

All deer – bucks and does, adults and fawns – urinate on the Tarsal Gland in a behavior called rub-urination. The bucks do this to establish dominance over other bucks, it is thought. There are many bucks at Erway Farms and I just never saw this behavior before. As the urine runs over the Tarsal Gland, the fatty material is secreted from the glands to the hairs. The urine that remains on the gland undergoes some kind of reaction with the air outside and with bacteria to produce the gland’s musky smell.

I know that this information does not paint a pretty picture, but I was intrigued when I saw the trance like behavior. So let’s end the post with a photo of a dainty doe eating corn provided by the nice customer. So much more a blog friendly image.

Golden Lion Tamarin of Brazil

Not a Harlequin Duck so no Clue

Ring-Tailed Lemur of Madagascar

Swan

Ibis

African Spoonbill of Madasgscar, Botswana, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe

African Lioness

Peeved Indian Peafowl

Testy Tamarin

Next post some photo plant portraits at the Buffalo Zoo.

I shot these images from the viewing platform because Marty is such a friendly fellow and will not move back for photos. In the image above, I had the owner throw him a pear just so he would move back from us. See how close he gets to the camera?So close you can’t even get a photo. Bet you never saw a zebra this close up.

Today we are at the gardens of the New York State Parks at Niagara Falls. The bed above is representative of the more informal of the gardens with its mixed-use planting. They use a combination of annuals, perennials, shrubs and trees.

The Parks Department incorporates many grasses, annuals and perennials.

This garden above, and the next two below, are at Whirlpool State Park. The images were taken only a week ago.

I often see the workers maintaining these beds filled with a variety of color and texture.

The red feathered cocks comb is used often in beds around the parks. Where Canada uses quite a bit of Canna, here they seem to use this plant for height and color later in the season. Images above and below come from the beds at the Niagara Gorge Discovery Center gardens.

The following images are taken at the gardens of the Niagara Falls Visitor Center. Here you visit the 1.5 acre gardens that depict the Great Lakes region above the falls, including grassy areas in the shapes of Lakes Michigan, Superior, Huron and Erie, as well as a walkway that follows the course of the Niagara River. Honestly, this is a bit of a stretch to see this in the shape of the paving and grassy areas, but it is a feature.

From a design perspective, they do have many Burning Bush planted in these gardens. It is pretty at this time of year, but is on the invasive species lists.

 This planting above, is an odd combo and is at the parking lot leading to the Visitors Center.

Like Canada, they also plant a large number of annuals en mass.

I found this peculiar, a Viceroy on Holly. The Butterfly Bush was right behind the holly and every time I got close, the Viceroy would take flight, but return back to the Holly. I did this no less than ten times because I did not understand why it would repeatedly land here.

 Benches are throughout the gardens and they are really pretty well used.

Grasses flanked by petunia are lighted at night.

They edge the beds with granite which I am sure is to aid in maintenance, but I am not fond of this heavy detail.

This is the Visitor’s Center and the image was purposefully shot this way. Here they show an IMAX movie at the Adventure Theater. I never have seen it though. They provide maps and information, have a gift shop and a variety restaurants, including specialty coffees, ice cream, a patio grill and a deli snack bar. Food as you would expect, is quite expensive.