POTW 6/4/2017

Posting Sunday instead of Saturday

#1 Aurora HDR on flower

Aurora Landscape Creative Drama

by Hin Man, on Flickr

I recently downloaded Aurora HDR 2017 edition. I am impatient when I see the export function is disabled in the downloaded version. I purchased it the same day that I downloaded. It is about $89 with coupon but I went ahead purchased a Trey Ratcliff's videos on the training. I have not gone through the videos as I like to explore slowly on my own.

And here is a collage of a few flower shots, also toned in Aurora. All are shot single shot.

Aurora Trey Ratcliff -- Peanut Butter Blowout

by Hin Man, on Flickr

I found Trey's preset the hardest to use as the color are too saturated and have the bleeding effects that is harder to tone than others. I like to use his first preset and Trey has funny names on the preset. There are other collections that I found more closer to nature and easier to tone down the HDR effects.

#2 Love Drumming

Most liked instrument -- the drums

by Hin Man, on Flickr

What I truly admire and dream about is playing drum. I once took few lessons in a fun class in church for less than a month with 5 sessions on drumming and it is the most fun of musical instruments that I have ever played with. I have played guitar and harmonica in childhood but the drumming experience tops it all. My instructor and teacher at the time called me a funky drummer as I am consistent at one time and funky and offbeat the rest of the time. You see a pattern here, I am the same on photography, I can be awesome and I can be ugly at the same series of photographs. Life is at odd with one's thinking, I may be ugly all the time without friends telling me so. And that is okay as I like to think some of my work is still awesome and appreciated. If you read psychology, you can read how insecure but happy I am at the same time.

#3 Kiron 28-70mm f/3.5-4.5, $19 from Etsy

20170604-DSC06954-2]20170604-DSC06954-2[/url]

by Hin Man, on Flickr

Light fixtures in church this morning in Bridges Community Church in Mission of Fremont, California.

I was off focus using an unfamiliar but recently bought used Kiron manual focus zooms that cost $19.00 from Etsy -- that is right not Ebay. It comes with a problem on loose focusing ring and I think I may have fixed it ugly with a piece of paper tucked into the underneath of its focusing sleeve but it seems to work. I fixed it with a piece of pink paper card with black wording, I would love to re-fix with black or red paper with black accent.

In Bridges Community Church, I have seen this lights fixture where a big LIFE dashboard of colored lightings are on display. I will need to reshoot this light with a better lens but I really like the off focus shot in macro mode where I had issue in getting too close to the light to nail the focus. My recent ACL rehab still prevents me from walking loosely and freely.

Life throws me a lemon and not only do I treat it like a golden lemon, I've made juices out of it after church service. It is a picture with divine nature.

#4 Pentax DA* 16-50 and K-3 shines

Bleeding Purple

by Hin Man, on Flickr

I did a group shot of friends at work. It was not an easy shoot as I was totally not prepared for the right setting and I couldn't ask for a repeat. I was shooting at around 21mm and when I suggested dabbing and the group responded beautifully. I forgot to widen my zoom and hence the cropping. I should have checked but the light was dim and it was only discovered when I edited the raw.

I did the coloring purple for a reason as Yahoo color is in purple. I designed the outfit of purple shirt and white tie and bow. And somehow I wants consistency in the picture and I went above and beyond in the editing department to pull this through in LR. It is impossible to tone mask a white tie to purple, no matter how I tried, it came out mostly white with a pinkish pink and not purple. I later learned from a friend in the video production team to lower exposure to give LR the contrast and hue to locally mask off the each of the tie white area to purple. It ain't perfect and I sweated hours to make it. Just wanted to share with you all

Cheers,

Hin

I don't see anyone, I want to post more in case to lure my friends back.

NOTE: I can't visit this page from Chrome as it keep flashing with an Ad opening and closing and making it impossible for me to view the page let alone doing any posting. I solved my own issue in using Firefox just for this forum posting. If you have problems, try Firefox

DSC06737_HDR

by Hin Man, on Flickr

HDR Aurora with Soft & Airy in Landscape preset collection

Cheers,

Hin

Great stuff ! Here is my 2 cents...

Nice Images all!

Doug