Day 6 - Up the Alley

So, today I tried out the lens correction tools in Lightroom, and as you can see, they work just fine. Compared to Photoshop's tools I would say they definitely work just as well. I did use the automatic crop though, and I think I'll avoid it next time - it left me with a slightly different composition than I started with. There's nothing wrong with what it left me this time, I actually think it's stronger, but I prefer not to have the software do the thinking for me - my picture, my composition :).

As for the post processing, it was quite simple this time - I mainly worked on enhancing the textures and colors - trying to make it look slightly less bland than what I started with, but not too wild. The sky was a no-go though, there simply wan't anything there to work with at all, so I had to fake it. I've been tweaking the color gradient a lot, and it took me a while to settle on this. I was constantly switching back and forth - is it too saturated, too dark, too blue, too grey? Finally I used the pipette tool, grabbed the color from the cobbles and chose a lighter more saturated nuance for the top gradient marker. I think I got it right... but then sometimes, when you go back to a photo later it's like "what was I thinking!?" Haha, I guess we'll see ;)

Cheers
/MrsHjort

Day 4 and 5 - Light, Lines and Details

Yesterday was a busy day, in many ways and so I didn't have the time to post. So I'll catch up today instead. I promised you I'd let you have a look inside the church, so here you go :).

I'm not a religious person, but I do love to marvel at the amazing pieces of art that churches so often are. This was no exception... The details, the artwork and the architecture is absolutely marvelous. I went into many churches in Italy, but I think this one is my favorite. I was even lucky enough to remember to remove the CPL-filter from my lens as I went inside. Sadly, I did not remember that a few other times, and I gritted my teeth at it afterwards as I saw the pictures... Oh well, we'll see if I can save those shots later on I guess...

/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 2 - I Love Raw

I remember back in the day when I used to shoot in jpeg... Oh my... how happy I am that those days are gone. Back then, I wouldn't even had bothered trying to save this shot - there are just so many problems with it. I shot this in the morning, and even though the sun was shining, it didn't reach down to the narrow streets of Bergamo. The bright sky and dark alleys made for horrible light conditions. But raw is awesome, Lightroom is too and after a lot of tweaking I'm finally happy with this image.

In Lightroom I dragged the highlights down a lot, and the shadows up a lot. Then I enhanced the clarity and contrast. In Photoshop I ran my lens correction routine, cloned away the sign on the left and then moved on to Nik's color filters. I used detail extractor, contrast color range, skylight, cross processing and Indian summer (to add red). I then added a few selective hue/saturation layers to tweak the sky (too grey), the rooftops (annoying purple/green) and the cobbles (too blue). Lastly, I burned a few of the shadows a bit to make the contrast look the way I wanted it to and desaturated the skin tones of the pedestrians. It was the longest time I've spent on a single photo in a long time, but the end result makes me happy :).

/MrsHjort

Day 1 - Bergamo

So... My blog has been dead as a door nail for quite some time now... Sorry about that. But now is the time for change, and instead of telling you excuses of how busy I've been, lets dive right into it. :)

Dagger Bay has provided me with the perfect opportunity to reopen my blog. We're running a Photo Processing Challenge and I aim to make it through all of the 30 days, or maybe even longer, it depends on, errrr well, loads of stuff I guess, but anyway, here goes.

This summer I went to northern Italy and that's my theme for this challenge. This shot is from Bergamo (old town), which is the first place we stayed at. It's a wonderful place to go if you're into old architecture like I am, and there are some really nice places to eat, yum!

This first shot is quite heavily processed as you can see. It went through the usual enhancements in Lightroom and then I pulled out the big guns in Photoshop (tree words, Google Nik Collection). I was uncertain as to weather I should clone away the top leaves or not, but I decided to keep them in because I like how they frame the clock tower. I hope you like it too.

/MrsHjort

13 Hours of Christmas

So, as I was crazy enough to sign up for a 12 hour challenge on Daggerbay, here goes! Here's 12 hour of Christmas with our jolly, loud and exuberant family :)

8:24 
I wake up with my usual sleeping buddies, meaning Mr and this little lady, who continues to watch over my morning routines hehe. It's the morning of Christmas eve, which is when Swedes celebrate Christmas, and the family will come over in the afternoon - meaning, lots to prepare!

9:22
Rather than showing you a bunch of shots of me cleaning our house, I though I'd share this little Christmas favorite of mine - this knitted Santa my grandmother made me back when I was a child. She was a wonderful lady, who always knitted us beautiful things. I still get tear in my eyes thinking of how much love she pored into it all. I remember how she apologized for running out of the red yarn half way up the red coat of this wonderful creation. That was my Grannie haha,  I've always loved it... How I miss her!

10:06
Mr is the boss in the kitchen, he's so much better at it than I am and I'm very happy to let him run the show. He's a wonderful cook! I have to watch my weight with him around. It's way to easy to eat too much when everything he makes is so delicious. Here he is preparing one of the upcoming Christmas dinner dishes, and enjoying a Swedish Christmas drink - glögg (a sort of mulled wine, that we drink with almond flakes and rasens).

11:42
I've long since given up on trying to convince the rest of the family to restrict the Christmas prezzies to the children alone. Most Swedish families don't buy Christmas presents for everybody, you see, but do "secret Santa" or some kind of raffle instead, and some even do Christmas games where you have to win your presents. Not our family though, nope! We go above an beyond haha! This isn't even all of the presents, it's not even half of them! It's a big hassle to buy one for everybody - and I hate shopping - but I have to admit, nothing beats the atmosphere of antecipation and joy that they bring. The children can hardly keep their fingers away waiting, and we have to keep them from examinering the presents a little too closely.

12:01
Getting snow for Christmas in Sweden is more unusual than you'd think, or well at least it is where I live. I'd say the chance is about 50/50. You see, we live by the second largest lake in Sweden, and it helps keep the area warm in the winter. So, if you go up to the "highland" from where I live, you can go from this, to a whole lot of snow in a short distance. It's kind of nice in the autumn, because it delays the cold and keeps our streets free from ice a bit longer than everywhere else, but it decreases our chansers of a white Christmas, and it delays spring. Sometimes it even freezes over, and that's when you know spring will be unusually late. It's a very cold and deep lake... It's very rarely freezes though. Also, being so deep, it seldom gets warm enough for one to want to go for a swim in it - it takes a lot of time to heat all that water. It's beautiful though, and very clean. As you can tell, I have a bit of a love/hate relationship to it haha.

This is the view from our attic. The lake is in the distance, and, as you can see, we didn't get any snow this Christmas. There was ice-rain though, a lot of good it did us, ha!

13:02
The first guests arrive! My parents, always early and just as happy as you see them here. Sweden is like that. If you're expected to come at a certain time, people will show up right then, and not a moment later. Being more than 10 minutes late is rude, and it's better to show up 10 minutes early. Many of my friends from abroad shake their heads at that haha! But anyway, these are my parents. Swedish mother, American father. They met on a stroke of luck when on a holiday in yet on other country, and now here they are :)

14:10
I don't know how common these are outside of Sweden, but we eat these "prince sausages" every Christmas, along with loads of other traditional food, like meat balls, Jansons frestelse, herring, turkey and much, much more. It's where the word smorgasbord comes from - smörgåsbord. Since our family is kind of large, we do potluck. It would simply not work otherwise, and so each of the guests bring their assigned dishes, and, as hosts, we try to coordinate the best we can. That's where Mr comes in, and I'm very happy to leave all that stuff to him :)

15:58
This is Mr carving the Christmas ham. That's the super star of the Swedish Christmas foods and it's preparation is a science of its own. Mr has been experimenting for years to get it better and better. First you have to pick the right one, be it a pig or wild boar, then it has to be boiled and baked in so or so many degrees for this or that long. Mr has gotten really good at it - even I who don't particularly enjoy ham, like the way he makes it.

16:15
Tada! All the dishes are finally heated and ready! They're so many they don't even fit into the picture, that's not even mentioning the desserts. We actually forgot one of the dishes in the refrigerator this year - my mother's orange and walnut sallad. It's one of my personal favorites, yum! I cannot believe we forgot it.... eeeer well, okay then, yes I guess I can really, there are just so many dishes (and I've got a cold, so my head isn't quite screwed on right), so, it's a wonder it doesn't happen more often really haha. Oh well, it tasted just as good this morning as we ate some of the leftovers. That's a wonderful thing to have every Christmas day - lots of yummy leftovers when you're too lazy to make breakfast. We'll have leftovers for days, even though we sent all our guests home with food too!

17:27
After dinner things calm down a bit, and we all sit down, too tired from eating all the food to do anything sensible. Just like it should be. Food is half the spirit of Christmas in Sweden. At this point, we just sit down and enjoy each other's company, catching up about whatever and talking about nothing in particular. I really enjoy when the whole family gets together like this, both my side and Mr's. All the people I love under one roof, what could possibly be better? If the food makes up one half of Christmas, family makes up the other.

18:02
The Children's wait is over and Santa has finally arrived! It's all a bit weird though, as all the presents have been under the Christmas tree all day, haha, but luckily the children don't think of that. Mr was worried he wouldn't be able to fool them this year - the girl in this picture was a bit suspicious last year and suspected it was him under that white beard. So, he bought a better costume and though up a better cover story to explain why he had to leave all of a sudden. He was so happy when it worked! The magic of Christmas got to endure a year longer, yey!

19:19
It's desert time! After everybody has opened their presents, it's the perfect time for sweeties. In this picture you'll see two of the Swedish classics. First, there's the orange rice, which is not to be mistaken by rice a la Malta... seriously, don't! Or my father in law, who made it, will explain it to you, in full detail haha. That's actually also one of the traditions. Not a Christmas goes by without that particular lecture. He has also made the other sweet in this picture - the controversially named ball... Don't ask, I'll just leave it at that ;)

20:51 (bonus)
Our evening ends with Christmas quizzes. They're not usually about Christmas, or the same questions would pop up every second year or so, but about trivia in general. I'm the worst at that sort of thing! Mr though, won both of them, the brainiac that he is. Just don't tell him I said so ;)

So there you go! 12 hours of Christmas, plus one extra bonus hour. I've never made this challenge before, it was a lot of fun!

Merry Christmas everybody!

/MrsHjort

CCC - November: Cold and Dry

I always find it hard to go out to shoot this time of the year. Sweden is cold, dark and colorless in the winter, and not particularly pretty - unless there's snow. I didn't want snow for November's shot though - I wanted something in between to get a nice transition from autumn to winter. Luckily, my laziness in terms of garden related work finally got me something good. I don't like the garden autumn work (once the harvesting has been done). It'd just so boring putting the garden to sleep, cutting away wilting flowers and trimming the stuff that needs trimming. I much prefer the planting in spring and watching new plants pop up every day. Well anyway, this is my wilting garden; it turned out rather pretty in the end, despite all :)

/MrsHjort

CCC - October: Breezy

This picture was one of those "right in the moment" kind of things. Mr and I was taking an autumn walk and it just hit me, right in the eye! A subject so perfect in itself, it was just the matter of getting the settings right and pressing the trigger. Nothing has been added, or arranged, the maple leaf just sat there, in all it's marvelous autumny colors, as if it was waiting for me to shoot it before it flew off in the wind again. Need I tell you that I simply love this shot? I hope you do too :)

/MrsHjort

CCC - September: Cool

These vines are actually from our garden, and no, they're not in a green house or in any other protected place. They're totally unshielded from the elements, right in the middle of our back yard, growing in a beautiful arch! Who would have thought it possible? Not me anyway... I never knew there were vines this hardy before - I do live in Sweden after all, but these vines are not only surviving, but thriving.

On to subject of photography... Back when I was a beginner I used to search for pretty subjects, groan at stuff that ruined the composition and move on (or shoot anyway and hope for the best). But experience has thought me that nature shots can be every bit as arranged as still life photography. This is one of those pictures. Grapes may be beautiful but it's super hard to find a perfect ones, and finding two perfect bunches of grapes right next to each other is next to impossible, especially when you need an exact angle, or the DoF will ruin one of them. Yes, I could do focus stacking, but I'd rather not! Fixing things the natural way is faster. So, the bunch of grapes on the left are really growing there, but the ones on the right are not. I hung them there after I picked them from an other part of the plant. Also, that little leaf above them both was placed there, in order to hide an ugly twig. And, last, but not least, I tugged at the leaves in the background to create a pleasing set of lines. It took som coaxing, but it turned out nicely. This picture even won my second golden CCC challenge trophy :)

/MrsHjort

CCC - August: Calm Afternoon

I was very happy to win the August competition. It's the first contest of the calendar series that I've won this year. That's always a great feeling, but this was even more special...

You see, I got a new camera for my birthday this year. I turned 30, and my family had all pitched in and bought me a brand new Nikon D7100 together. They're just the best (thank you, thank you, thank you!)! This win, is extra special because this is one of the very first photos I shot using my new toy, it's the first time I tried the HDR function that I had been longing for, and it's the first one taken with my new camera that I entered into a competition. That made the win all the more special to me. It was so great to be able to tell my family about the win when they asked me how I liked my new camera :)

/MrsHjort

CCC - July: Partially Cloudy

I just realized I've been so busy with the DaPP challenge, I've totally forgotten to update my blog on regarding the Calendar Challenge! This is July's picture, taken in my backyard. It was one of those annoying days when the clouds got in the way all of the time, so I had to wait and wait whenever I chose a new subject. I didn't want to shoot when the sun was behind the clouds because it automatically makes the colors look washed out and the contrasts become flat. Sure you can always fake it, but the real thing is always better! After waiting for what seamed like an eternity the sun finally showed at last... for about 2 seconds, and then it hid again. I gritted my teeth at it at the time but took a bunch of shots anyway - because the light still shone through a bit. Funnily, those shots ended up being the best of the bunch. They had just the right amount of light to blow life into the colors, and at the same time, not too much light as to make stuff too "contrasty". So, partially cloudy it was. Yey!

/MrsHjort