Everything is just ducky!

In contrast to yesterday, today was a great day! The best part was meeting up with fellow blipper, EvelyneNaylorC. She is an amazing and talented lady! We had lunch and a stroll around the Nevada Museum of Art. I was exciting to learn how much we had in common besides blipfoto!

After our lunch, I decided to take a walk and discovered this boy talking with the ducks. He had some kind of food for them and was calling them to him. I have to admit that I listened in to his talk. He was pretending that they were his soldiers and he was calling them to arms. It was incredibly cute! I can only imagine my three grandsons doing the same thing. And I loved his green hat!

After a few more pictures, I headed home. My friend who is remodeling my bathroom was there. He was ready to load up the two huge bookcases that I had decided to give away. They were much too big for our little house. So, between the two of us, we got them both moved and loaded into his trailer. As he was driving away, I felt so relieved. Sometimes giving things away and letting them go can be such a cathartic experience.

For this shot, the light was fading fast, so I shot at ISO 500. I was trying to be a bit surreptitous, so this was hand-held. Because I was shooting this from a bit of a distance, I chose an aperature of f-16. I used a shutter speed of 1/500 sec. for the correct exposure and took several shots. I loaded the RAW shots onto my computer, and converted them to DNG format. I then loaded the DNG shots into Photoshop, decided on this one and made a slight adjustment using the Tone Curve. I copied the DNG into a jpeg format. Then, in the jpeg format, I copied the background layer through a high pass filter, then overlayed that onto the original jpeg, which sharpened the image. I also adjusted the color balance slightly to bring out the blue in the ice.

Thank you all for the comments, stars and favs lately. Several of you have mentioned how much you appreciate my recitations of how I took and processed my shots using layers and masks. Blipfoto has a wonderful tutorial on layers and masks that got me started. From there, I have been using techniques learned from www.templatephotoshop.com (which has some free photoshop tips). Hope this helps. As I find additional resources, I will let you know.