"Fields" Triptych

"Fields" Triptych, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

Frustrating and stressful weekend!

The stress: my dog isn't well....probably on her last legs which isn't great news. Jye is just about the only member of my family who can put up with me when I'm out and about with the camera. Ah well...she's 12 which is a good age for German shepherds...she'll be missed...excuse me....manly sniff...

The frustration: maybe it was the worry about Jye, but I just couldn't take a good picture on my Saturday trip out with the camera. Every shot I took looked boring, done before and the blazing sunshine (whilst great) meant a lot of blown shots and the Oly white balance/exposure compensation doing overtime.

I was also exploring new territory, around the Howforth bridge. It's a really agricultural area to south of Nairn and following on from my successes with fields last week, I wanted to get some more 'pastoral' type scenes.

Okay so you've got great weather, rolling green hills, interesting subject matter? And the result? Not very much really.

So anyway...I decided to resort to some photoshop practice and using a template from the May issue of 'Digital Photo' - I created the attached. I'm quite pleased with it...it makes 3 rather dull pictures look a bit more interesting and I learned a fair bit about using the 'transform', 'distort' and 'skew' commands in PS.

Finally, "Cats Sunset" becomes my first picture to win awards on flickr and has had over 130 views! Not bad for a noob with 7 months experience.

Oh and even more finally, I was approached by Ed O' Keefe, asking if he could critique - "Greenweed" on his site. He's given a really balanced view of the pic and even gone as far as tweaking the pic himself to show how he would have done it! Not sure if I entirely agree, but it's really flattering to get critiqued on his external site.

Interesting that he's also challenged the horizon position...note that all the pics on todays blog entry are rule of thirds compliant :)