Ode

Another photo of one of my favourite photographic subjects, I never get sick of the climbing hydrangea! The photo was taken with my wonderful new Pentax 50-135 f2.8 lens, it produces some lovely bokeh. I textured this on the laptop while I was at our country hut this past weekend  and since our hut isn't connected to the electricity grid, it was done by the light of a gas lantern with me hoping the laptop battery wouldn't run out before I got it finished. It was a quick one to process though, I think I used the first textures I tried which were....

Ovid Banished @ Soft Light 100%
Giverny @ Overlay 100 % (this was responsible for much of the green tone)
The  focus flower was using a curves layer masked from the rest of the image.

See it a little larger on Flickr

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Just like to take this opportunity to thank all our customers and viewers and wish everybody from both of us - Happy Holidays!:-)
Here's an oldie but a Goldie, taken with a 75-300m zoom lens in the summer at a small lavender farm at Barjac in the Gard area of the south of France.

Processed first by tone mapping in Photomatrix, to enrich then adding:
Phosphorescence - opacity - Soft Light @ 51%
From Pack One of our Flypapers.
I gave the final image a clean up with a slight paint effect
Reprinted here:
"To achieve the painterly effect, I simply use the 'Colour Noise filter'
at a very low setting, then sharpen this with 'Poster Edges' Filter at around 10%.This pulls it together again, I sometimes also use the
'Paint Daubs' filter at a low setting and then Poster Edges".

fishing trip

On Sunday afternoon just to curb the midwinter 'Cabin fever'
we drove up towards the mountains. The light was clear and the air was crisp, but this time I diverted, hung a left and drove to 'Lake Salagou'.
Normally its a tourist nightmare, being the biggest and most famous lake in our area of the languedoc, but now in midwinter it's almost deserted, and apart from it being a couple of meters lower than it should after our 10 year drought, looked superb!
These guys were having a great time, all over the place, drinking, and not much catching as it was too cold for fish to bite. The sun was setting, catching a slight mist. These light misty scenes are ideal to texture.
The last two overlays are blurred because I liked the color they gave but wanted to keep the bokeh effect soft.

Textures used are from both packs, using the first listed to the last.

Chlorophyll (Blurred) Opacity - Soft Light @ 19%
Muscatel - Opacity - Soft Light @ 25%
Apple Blush - Opacity - Soft Light @ 44%
Pompeii Stucco - Opacity - Soft Light @ 32%
Phosphorescence - Opacity - Overlay @ 48%
Phosphorescence (Blurred) - Opacity - Overlay @ 22%
Phosphorescence (Blurred) - Opacity - Overlay @ 22%