Day 10 - Details, Details, Details

The top picture shows some of the wonderful artworks inside Cathédrale Notre-Dame d'Amiens. In terms of color the interior not as lavish as the churches in Rome, but nonetheless beautiful (although I noticed one of the motifs are a bit morbid). There are so many wonderful aspects to this cathedral it's a marvel to work with as a (in my case, hobby) photographer - so many interesting viewpoints and ways to work with perspective. I found this spot especially interesting because of how the Gothic arches work together in both the foreground and the background, and in the art as well.

The bottom picture is from one of the chapels that have yet to be renovated. As you can see it has seen better days but I though it charming nonetheless. I have a sore spot for old faded things and don't mind flaking color or worn wallpaper, in the right environment that is, and this is one of those places. It was interesting to contrast it to the other areas of the cathedral.

/MrsHjort

Day 39 - Solitude

As you enter Castel Sant'Angelo you'll pass by some wrought iron bars that section off small rooms. That is where I noticed this urn, all alone in a corner, with the light hitting it beautifully from the side. It's probably not special in any way - there was no explanation or plaque to tell me about it - but the scene was one of those that screamed "shoot me!". The light conditions - quite dark - had me wondering if I'd manage to pull it off, but the metal bars turned out to be excellent helpers. So I held my breath, steadied the lens on (and through) the bars and hoped for the best. I was happily surprised that it turned out to be free of motion blur and crystal sharp. It's weird, but this is one of my favorite shots from our trip... It's not of anything special or unique in any way, but that lighting... I really like its interplay with the urn and the wall behind it :)

/MrsHjort

Day 7 - The Stonemason's Handiwork

One thing I love about Bergamo is all the stone. It's everywhere – the street, the houses, the statues, the walls... Neatly bricked with embellishments or plain and jumbled, like in this shot. I find the textures very interesting. Initially I had though to use this as a source and try my hand at texturizing images, but I have to admit, it also has a beauty in itself. Don't you agree?

/MrsHjort

Day 3 - Basilica Santa Maria Maggiore

As a crazy cat lady I can never resist the urge to shoot cats... errrr, no scratch that, it came out totally wrong! I can never resist the urge to photograph cats haha! This little lion made for a perfect interest point in my photo. I love places like this, with so many details and gorgeous lines. It's a treat to work with.

This church was founded in 1137. It always blows my mind to be at places like this. It has stood there for almost 900 years... What was it Yoda said "When 900 years old, you reach. Look as good, you will not". Well this place still looks stunning!

I'll let you have a look inside tomorrow :)

/MrsHjort

Day 11 - Royal Scots Greys

This is an other one of those shots with a blown out sky.... Gargh! I hate it when that happens! An overcast sky is hard to manage, and sometimes I forget to think about that... especially when I've been walking around all day and can't wait to get "home" to where I hung my hat that particular day. Thankfully, I've made progress with my "sky-fixer technique" using the "clouds" function under the filters menu in Photoshop. I figured I could use the perspective transform tool in order to create the correct distortion, and as you can see, it worked out quite well. It may not given me the natural details of real clouds, but at least it brings me a close enough approximation and it looks much better than it did before. So, I'm happy... at least for the time being. I'm thinking hard on how to make the effect more life like; maybe I could add some kind of ripple effect selectively, but I'll have to think on that some more before I start experimenting. No doubt the solution will come to me during the night...

Sleep tight :)

/MrsHjort

Day 9 - St Mary's Cathedral

This is the beautiful Cathedral of St Mary. I never got the chance to go there during my last visit to Edinburgh, so this time I just had to. It didn't disappoint, going there was like love at first sight. I absolutely adored the architecture and I could have spent hours there, just experimenting with camera angles and composition. Unfortunately, we only stayed in the city for two days, and Mr was anxious to move on to see more things, but I managed to get a shot or two... or 50 haha :)

I have waited with this shot deliberately because I had to think about what to do with it. As you can see in the original below, the light areas of the sky were totally blown out and I had to create a (to me) whole new approach to deal with that. As usual the solution came during the night. That's when I came up with using the Clouds filter, and it worked! Yey!

On an other note, I'm happy to tell you that our work in the garden is nearing the end. A day or two more, and our garden will be tucked in and ready for winter. Yey! That means more free time for Mrs!

/MrsHjort

Day 27 - Lions and Vines

I have a feeling that this combination of lions and vines found above the door is not very common outside of France. At least it felt very french to me. I love little details like that, they convey the heart and soul of the places they're in.

The village surrounding the castle looks like it came straight out of the fairy-tales, and this shot is typical of what it looks like - very authentic, filled with lovely flowers and oh, so beautiful! You could easily film a movie set in the medieval ages here, or why not an episode of Game of Thrones? Remove a few modern details, like the lamp, and I could see Daenerys stopping here on her way to Westeros :).

I was a bit surprised to find out that people actually live in this beautiful place. Walking through the streets, I thought that it felt closer to a museum than a place where you park your car and go inside to relax on the sofa. What a lovely place to live. I envy the people ho get to call this place home.

/MrsHjort

Day 25 - Three Pots

Sorry, no real blogg tonight, just pictures. I actually went to bed before realizing that I forgot to do the challenge! Not that I'd have to get up and do it, but I like to. I'm just a bit too tired to think up something interesting to say. I'll do better tomorrow.

Night night

/MrsHjort

Day 24 - Bricks and Stone

The juxtaposition of these very different types of stone caught my eye as I was wandering through the castle. Not that I know when they started laying brick walls like this, but I have a feeling it wasn't in the Medieval ages - it looks way to even and well maintained to be that old. I guess they had to redo this fireplace at some point. I like the effect nonetheless.

This will be the end of my abstract texture high key shots, and I'll move on to... I don't really know what I'll move on to... I've sort of exhausted the best of my shots from the day at the market, but I might be able to dig up some more if I really try. Otherwise you'll se some of the other pictures I took in France. Either way, I'm no way near done with this challenge :)

I'll see you tomorrow

/MrsHjort

Day 23 - Carved by Hand

I'm showing you an other beautiful piece of interior today. Looking back, I remember that I found it particularly hard to do a partial subject in this case, since it was so beautifully detailed and I wanted to have it all and show it off in all its splendor. Sometimes, it's not easy to find the right balance between the marvel you feel when you've found a lovely subject and cold calculated composition. I'm still doubting myself when it comes to this shot, and I've experimented with the cropping a bit, but I'm satisfied enough to show you my take on it today. I don't remember if this was a cabinet door or a piece of the wonderful wall panels. But whatever it is, it certainly managed to captivate me :)

/MrsHjort

Day 22 - Aged

I can't help but wonder how this would have looked when it was brand new. The fine apartments of the castle were all beautifully decorated and filled with wonderful details such as this. It must have been stunning! Though as beautiful as it must have looked back in the day, I think I like this better, not to live in mind you, but as a subject for photography.

Speaking of photography, I've gotten a brand new camera (Nikon D7100) as a birthday present from my family, and I'm having so much fun checking it out! All the new functions are so much fun to explore. I was just outside in my garden testing the HDR-settings and I'm very satisfied with the results I got. It's so much easier than the way I used to do it. As a matter of fact I've just entered one of the HDR shots from today into the Calendar Corsair Challenge for this month at DaggerBay. So you'll get to see it in a bit over a week. Time will tell how it all goes.

/MrsHjort

Day 21 - Sculpted

I have to admit, when I was at the castle in Chateauneuf en Auxois, I totally fell in love with all the little details inside, like the ornamented windows, the sculpted stone and the aging paint pealing off hand-crafted wood. I love stuff like that. I'm a sucker for aged textures :).

Editing the shots, I'm trying very hard to resist my urge to crank up the contrast. I love doing that as it usually brings out the colors and clarity of a shot, though these shots are all about the texture and light, and cranking up the contrast eliminates that. I hope I've gotten it right - a part of me still wants to crank up the contrast, but then, the different shades of white and grey are more discernible this way, so I keep going back to it.

Do you agree? Is less more in this case?

Cheers

/MrsHjort

Day 20 - White Door

An other Saturday and we're hosting yet another birthday party. It's quite fun do get to celebrate my birthday almost the entire month haha. This time it's with my family. We had planned to invite them all earlier, but both Mr and I were sick back when we had planned to host the family dinner, so we had to cancel. We're still not 100% well, this dang cough just never ends, but we're definitely well enough to celebrate, eat cake and enjoy ourselves.

As usual Mr prepared my cake, and as usual he has outdone himself! He tries to make the cakes larger and more yummy each year haha. So, this year it's a 8 layered cake, with 30 written in blueberries on top, and a lot of fruit and berries inside. Yum yum yum! I'll try to take a picture and show you the masterpiece.

See you tomorrow

/MrsHjort

Day 19 - Window Knob

Today I'm starting the next segment of shots from that day at the Medieval market - shots of details from inside the castle. There were loads of pretty stuff in there - authentic, aged, beautifully worn and oh so charming!

I have to confess that there is an ulterior motive to me doing this particular segment - it's not all about the subjects. You see, I don't do high key shots very often, and this is my chance to practice editing them. So please, don't be afraid to give me a pointer or two. I always appreciate feedback.

The post-ed here was a bit more complex than what one might think. I started with the usual stuff - Levels, Detail extractor, High key, Cross processing, Foliage (to enhance the yellow spectra) and a slight vignette. Then I did some local editing to brighten the knob and the wood. That blew out the highlights to the right though, so I used a soft history brush to bring them back. The experimenting almost made me forget about sharpening haha. But only almost.

/MrsHjort

Day 18 - Gunpowder

This is me trying out fake DOF on a still life in order to make distracting stuff in the background less distracting. Did it work? Or did I just blow in by telling you haha. I like the result nonetheless, even though this is a very brown shot (I'm no fan of the color).

I am a fan of olden things though. I think it's my next favorite thing to shoot, right after nature. There are just so many wonderful textures to be found on the surfaces of aged stuff.

There is also something very attractive about things that have been made by hand. They're not perfect like the massproducerad stuff you see everywhere nowadays, and those little "imperfections" make them much more interesting. A little wonkiness, asymmetry or a crack or two... nothing wrong with that. Great stuff, it shows character :)

/MrsHjort

Day 14 - Fresh Meat

Not mush processing was needed for this shot. Subjects such as these make themselves and only need a tiny bit tweaking. I used levels, Detail extractor, Contrast color range, Skylight filter and a vignette. That's it. Easy peasy.

We hosted a party last night, celebrating my 30th birthday with our friends. It was a great evening, it always is when those guys are involved! Our friends are awesome! Funnily it was also our official "moving in party". "Funnily" because we have actually lived here for over two years now. We teased a friend of ours for the very same thing a few years back - it took him a while too - but we ended up taking even longer ourselves. Now though, that our house is finally fully renovated, we felt that it was completed enough to host that party - all rooms are now actually moved into, even that one "room of chaos" where "everything" went haha.

 /MrsHjort

CCC - May: Mild

There are a lot of poppies in my garden, They seed each year and new ones keep on sprouting all over. That particular capacity is great, since they're not only pretty, but excellent ground cover plants too. They help me keep the weeds at bay...

I absolutely fell in love with the elegant lines of the poppy stalks this spring, I just had to do a shot like that for the calendar. Finding the perfect subject wasn't hard (we have a lot of poppies) and playing around with the shots in post-ed was a lot of fun. I've done quite a lot work to enhance the textures and bring out the different shades of green, yellow and turquoise. The end result makes this one my favorite of the series this far. A picture of three buddies, hanging out :)

/MrsHjort

Nr 31 - Happiness

Congratulation again to all who made it!

In addition to being an homage to essjaynz, LetItBeFun and Regoch who made the whole moth following the word list in their own individual and o so wonderful ways, this shot is an acclaim to kimbomac who shot such lovely texture images every day. It's also a salute to sectretatlantis, and her marvelous search for the light, and I do believe she got it right! The shallow focus is a tribute to purplefrog, who delighted us with her use of DOF. This is also on the theme of abstract patterns and shapes, which is what sfalice dazzled us with this month. And finally, the picture is monotone therefore a bow to JustLou, who managed to get her beautiful rainbow in the end.

And now to why this shot is "happiness" to me... Fist off, it's yellow which has always been the number one happy color to me, and that's the reason why we painted our bedroom mango yellow. It's a shot of a piece that is very dear to me. It symbolizes our current home in many ways and it evokes many fond memories of past times. Also it's made of things you can bring home with you from trips to sunny warm places, which is very much happiness to me.

Can you guess what it is?

/MrsHjort

Day 30 - Newspaper

Sorry, no story about newspapers this time - there's simply too much else to say ;).

So! It's finally arrived! The final day of the 30-day challenge is here! Like always, it's a bitter-sweet moment. It's a bit of a relief that it's over - I won't have to plan a specific shot each day anymore. Surprisingly (not) carrying the camera around everywhere can be a bit of a nuisance, not to mention the times the battery has died on me (one of them being today), which has been very irritating to say the least. And I can live without the embarrassing shots of bus-stops as people walk by thinking I'm crazy! Also, no more cases of "camera-eye" (fucuseyeus stangeis) or "trigger-finger-itis" (itchyis spasmus), fellow photographers, you know what I mean!

However, I also love the challenges! I'ts such a great opportunity to get to know the wonderful people who play, and see their awesome shots each day. I've seen so many beautiful shots that make me think and break my own habits, and it's been such a joy to see people develop and breaking barriers of their own.

Another great thing is the comments I have received. They have been such a silver lining to every day (not cloud). Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for taking the time to stop by and sharing your thoughts. You're the reason why W1K is a great place to be and I hope we'll keep in touch :).

Also, thank you to all you other visitors who have stopped by to take a gander each day. Seeing the stats map of all the people who come here, from all over the world, is just sooo cool! I hope I'll see you around here too! And feel free to drop me a line whenever :)

Finally I want to say congratulations to everyone who made it, and well done to those who tried! It's been an amazing challenge this time! You're all winners in my book!

Cheers!

/MrsHjort

Day 22 - Shop

As I said before, I no girly girl, I've never had that "shopping rush" and I've never understood the obsession some people have with shopping. I like to be in and out of a store as quickly as possible or, even better, shop online and avoid the hassle altogether.

Sometimes you get lucky though. I work in the city center and this Friday I walked by this store I've never really noticed before. That's when I saw this knitted poncho hanging outside. It was one of those rare things I liked straight away, and I had been thinking of buying something like that to keep at work, so I bought it. I was in and out of the store in under a minute! If only it was always so easy :)

/MrsHjort