rotheche

Working from home on a grey Sunday. Highlighters the only source of brightness., originally uploaded by rotheche.

Today's photo, so I'm all caught up.

A warm and sunny Saturday, just right for lying in the sun., originally uploaded by rotheche.

It's not often one of our cats cooperates, photographically speaking.

My little pot of cables. There are so many of them these days., originally uploaded by rotheche.

This is the start of a new project - I do these every now and then. New iPhone (from work) so, to test it out, new photo a day for a year.

Dinosaur macro, originally uploaded by rotheche.

I picked up some new gear from Photojojo and it arrived the other day.

One of the things was a macro adaptor; I whacked it on the 50mm lens and got this shot. Bear in mind, Ted the Tyrannosaur is only an inch or so high.

There's a tendency to soften everything, and the depth of field is now very shallow - the 'bloodshot' white of Ted's eye is quite clear, but everything else blurs. The white blur behind Ted is Frank the Brachiosaurus; to give you an idea of the depth of field, his head was probably only a little over half an inch behind Ted's.

(The dinosaurs are bonus inclusions in Photojojo orders. Order from them, get a free toy dinosaur.)

Red lily, originally uploaded by rotheche.

It's an odd sort of image, this one: Nikon D60 with the Lensbaby Muse on it, and both the 10x and 4x macro adaptors screwed on to that. This is the very base of the petal, flipped vertically and considerably tweaked in Photoshop.

Meerkat, originally uploaded by rotheche.

Meerkats are just freakin' adorable.

There are two colonies at Melbourne Zoo. Well, one full colony, and one other space that only had one meerkat in it - poor little guy, all on his own.

This photo is from the first group, the full colony. It was a warm day, and a lot of the meerkats were like this, belly-down on the dirt. Still bright and alert though. And still freakin' adorable.

Zebra, originally uploaded by rotheche.

Another photo from our trip to the zoo the other day. Considerable Photoshop, obviously.

Tweak levels and desaturate, duplicate the layer; in the new layer, drop the brightness and increase the contrast. Soft light blending, merge the layers, crop.

Tiger tiger, originally uploaded by rotheche.

We went to the zoo the other day - it's a favourite photographic haunt.

I wasn't really expecting many of the animals to be active, since it was quite a warm day and we were there around the middle of the day and into early afternoon.

But I got a surprise: quite a lot of them were up and around.

One of my favourite photos of the day was completely accidental: the Sumatran tiger wouldn't stay still, so the image I got was a little blurred. Some tweaking of levels, brightness and contrast turned it into this - rather than an exact likeness of the tiger, it's an impression of her motion and restlessness.

Lens flare in a lens-less camera, originally uploaded by rotheche.

This is a re-scan of an older image, the 'lens flare in a lensless camera' one.

It's a lot less grainy (here's the original for comparison), but loses a bit of detail too.

Which one works better?