Monday, September 14, 2009

Another Dahlia

I went out to my mom's garden again the other day to take some pictures of her dahlias.  The one I've posted here is one of my favourites.  It's a pom-pom one, and I really like them.  Normally I'm drawn to all things purple (including flowers), since that is my favourite colour; however, I really like the yellows and oranges in this flower.

I cropped the picture some as there was a blurred yellow flower in the background.  You can see a little of it in the upper right hand cornder.  It was a little too distracting and took away from where I wanted the focus of this photo to be - the orange flower.  Other than cropping, I adjusted colour, tone, sharpness, etc. by clicking on the automatic buttons because I'm not very good at doing that myself.

I worked on another dahlia photo as well - a red pom pom - and got more of a close-up shot.  It's not quite a macro shot, but it's close.  The only thing about that photo is the background - it looks a little too noisy (or at least what I think photographers have been referring to as being noisy) and I'm not sure how to fix it.  I'll post a picture of that one tomorrow, and maybe I'll be able to get some advice along the way on how to clean up the noise.  Then I can post the before and after photos.

I think I may have figured out why my Photoshop Elements wasn't working.  Some of the features would work, but then others (like the feature that allows you to write/type on the photo - I think that's referred to as the watermark, but I'm not really sure yet) would freeze my computer.  Anyway, I did a virus scan and it found a cookie.  I deleted it, and then tried PSE and it worked!  I don't know if that is what was causing my problem or not, but I'm just thankful it's working again!  Now I can continue making adjustments to my photos and, hopefully, making them better!  Though, I still have a long way to go to learn how to use the program.

My question for you:  What is your favourite thing to photograph, and why?