The mythical origins of Dragon's Blood

The “pigment” dragon's blood NR31 is actually a resin that medieval artisans used, and despite the dramatic name, it came from a rather more mundane source than you might expect. It was harvested from the dracaena draco tree, a type of rattan palm, which grows in places like the Canary Islands, northern Africa, the Arabian peninsula, parts of Indian sub-continent and famously Socotra island off the coast of Yemen. The resin is a beautiful deep, warm crimson-red with slightly brownish undertones and was prized for painting, varnishing, and even medicinal purposes. Medieval crafts people valued it because it was vibrant and had decent staying power, though it could be pricey, which meant it was often reserved for important illuminated manuscripts or high-end decorative work.

 I’ll leave the best story telling to Evie Hatch, Jackson’s pigment expert and researcher.

Proof reading and summary assisted by Claude Sonnet 4.5 (AI)

Lunar Eclipse & Blood Moon

The press was full of hype about the longest eclipse and blood moon for a century. So I did want to photograph it and figured Venus Bay would be a great spot to do it. It was until the clouds rolled in. C’est la vie

PS Flickr. Instagram and the various local news programs where swapped with similar images, yet there is some pridein that these are my own.

On a Bright Day

Experimenting with a long lens for macro photos (in my garden). Unlike portraits flowers can still look beautiful in the harsh Australian sun

PhotoFriday :: Saturation

Saturation but getting wet as well as colour

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Saturation

ArtInspired :: The Banksia in the rain

Still thinking of the process used by artist to create an image versus how a photographer might capture that image. It has been a overcast and drizzly day but I managed to get a photograph of a banksia cone in flower. A almost good photo in itself and I had run a bracketed set (handheld) but it was windy so it was hard to merge and properly register. Rather than commit them to the reject bin it was a worthwhile starting point to reconstruct an image in the manner an artist might.

I’m just using my HP Spectre Tablet in tablet mode so I started with the original image and used the Polarr app to add a little contrast, contrast and strength to the red (both luminance and saturation, but not two much). I might have normally preformed this in lightroom and/or OneOne but they are not as touch screen aware as Polarr, which is a pretty neat photo edit app with really intuitive and easy to use basic tools that can easily be used by hand in tablet mode. An artist might start with the background and the overall colour, so I switched to Corel painter essentials and first set up what they call smart blur (which help highlight the strong compositional elements) and also refined the colour palette (I just wanted to enhance the two colours red and green, classic complimentary colours so I pulled back the saturation of any other colours). I use painter essential to do a very quick starter clone painting of the background. Unfortunately this smeared out the red so I use a soft clone brush to bring out sharper edge  of the Banksia flower (this helped later registration of the images). Next I re-ran the HDR merge using Aftershot Pro, with particular focus on getting best registration on the banksia. However the droplets of water where no longer perfect.

  

I now had three separate and subtly different images and used OnOne 10.5 layers to blend them together.  The background from the clone painting, the foliage and water droplets on the upper stamens from the original photo and the flower itself a combination (a soft blend mode) of the original photo and HDR image (mainly to enhance the colour).  With a Brush Border from OnOne Enhance

I’m not sure how to refer to this style of image. Is it digital art, a faked photo (aka photoshopped which of course it isn’t) or photomontage or something different (and new)?

“We called it photomontage because it reflected our aversion to claiming to be artists”  …Hannah Höch

PhotoFriday :: Heat

 For PhotoFriday‘s topic Heat

PhotoFriday :: The Milk Run

The TSS Earnslaw, the original milk run.

 For PhotoFriday‘s topic Transportation

Red Sky in the morning

I must admit I’m normally still snuggling in a warm bed at this time of the morning, and it has been a very cold spell. However I was up and awake early today and able to capture the first light of dawn. Giving me a great opportunity to compare my “girls” (the three current mistresses, aka photo managers/editors, I’m using rather than picasa/google photos) as I would normally edit/tweak them. The Photo on the right is the original unedited Jpeg. The photos below are edited by AfterShot , Lightroom  and Perfect Photo Suite 9. These three systems render my .pef file (Pentax’s RAW format) differently but their RAW file renders all look very flat compared with the jpeg. I liked the dark silhouette of the trees, so I have left the images very low key and just just concentrated of adding a little extra contrast and vibrance.I also straighten and cropped each version. In the edge they all look somewhat similar, supporting the observation that it probably doesn’t matter a lot which software you use as long as it does what you want.

AfterShot Pro 2, which has become my first stop on my laptop. In this case I have just click on Perfect Clear and lifted the vibrance slider a little. With a straightening and crop to finish. All over in seconds
Lightroom 4.4, was a little more considered and all done in the development module, lifting clarity (rather than contrast) and a little vibrance (not saturation) then straightening and crop.

Perfect Photo Suite 9, was a actually my second port of call but I have left it till last as it seems to match my memory of the moment best. I started in Perfect enhanced (which is where cropping and straightening are normally undertaken. Whilst there I couldn’t resist using their wonderful content aware magic  perfect eraser to remove the two light poles (which would have bee a very time consuming task with a cloning tool on the second post behind the tree). I also finished with perfect effects, a natural Dynamic Contrast, A fall enhancer Colour Enhancer bought back to 60% layer opacity and a soft darker vignette

PhotoFriday :: RED

Photographed at Rainforest Habitat Port Douglas

For PhotoFriday‘s topic RED

Strawberry & Cream (Cheese) Santas

A cute Christmas treat, slight variation on the age recipe. I just didn't make enough of them.

PhotoFriday :: Warmth

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Warmth

PhotoFriday ::Vanishing points (and posts)

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Perspective

Still Life in Light & Shadows

Lunar Eclipse

There was a full lunar eclipse tonight here in New Zealand just after sunset, but unfortunately it was a heavy cloud cover and raining. So I only got a few glimpses of the eclipse and had to really push the ISO to get any decent exposure. However I was happy that I did capture realistic colour, for the so call "blood moon".

New Zealand Motif

  

PhotoFriday :: Plant Kingdom

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Plant Kingdom

PhotoFriday :: Fiery Sky

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Fiery

PhotoFriday :: Temperature

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Temperature

PhotoProject :: One Colour at a Time

Those that know me may realize I tend to stay away from the latest trendy filters, those zany pre-sets or must-have, over the top plug-ins. My reasoning is that everyone's fashionably filtered photos then tend to look the same-ish and I’d much rather work out my own post processing style and look a bit different. However there is one technique that a lot of folk ask me about and that is taking an image back to black and white but only highlighting one colour (or maybe a couple) there are actually a number of ways to do this so I though It might make a good series of  photoprojects to follow through a couple of examples. The first and easiest way, is actually to recommend that you  look at some presets in Lightroom, onOne offer a number of lightroom, photoshop and aperture plug-ins and presets. Their prefects effect 4, set of lightroom presets are free to download and includes a neat single click set of “hand tinting” functions. See a few of these hand tints below.

This is all extremely easy (and fun) but it is actually pretty easy to make your own colour filers using the HSL,Colour, B&W group on the develop menu in lightroom. In this case I’m using the HSL (Hue, Saturation & Luminace panel) and I have destaturated all but the colours green, yellow,aqua & blue, So these desaturated colours are greyed but the colours I selected remain. Time to have some fun with colour, one colour at a time.

PhotoProject :: Colour My Day

Over the past week I have been trying to take a coloured themed photo each day, and it was harder than it might seem. Yet colour is everywhere, pretty much anywhere with light starts to deliver a spectrum of wavelength that we see are colours. The photographic challenge here was to see those situations where one colour dominated.