The Neighborhood

Ha, I have Arcade Fire playing in my head now…  Anyhow.

Last week, I posted photos of the two souriceaux (should say souricettes, seeing as they’re girls) taken on October 27 and November 11.  This week, I’m posting the scenery from those two “outings” (one of them was my backyard, hardly an outing).  I don’t know what’s wrong with me but I had the hardest time choosing photos and editing them.  I’m fearful.  I play with a photo and end up only adjusting the colour curve a teeny tiny bit to have better contrast.  I’m afraid of it looking unnatural.  I don’t know.  I feel like I’m not doing enough to the photos but I’m afraid to touch them at the same time.  They’re digital for crying out loud! It’s not like I can’t make a million different changes and save them separately! It’s not like the original file has to be ruined! I need to get a grip.  I guess it doesn’t help that I don’t have gobs and gobs of time to work on editing.  Emmanuelle’s social life is still taking up a lot of time and my Christmas crafting isn’t moving as fast as I would like it to so I tend to focus on that rather than the blog…

In any case, here’s what I have.  On October 27, if you remember, we participated in a street wide tag sale.  I took my camera to help pass the time.  It was getting windy and leaves were falling.  I tried to get a picture of a falling leaf.  Are you kidding me? I could have stood there continuously shooting for an hour and not have gotten as single leaf falling in the right spot at the right time.  I gave that up pretty fast…  After the tag sale, I did go to the backyard.  I wanted to get some photos of the trees.  And I wanted the photos to make it look like we practically live in a forrest (we don’t).

Taken from below, the trees look so tall! I tried to adjust the colour curve to make that yellow tree stand out more but this is as much as I could do at first…

Same trees. Got brave and adjusted the value curve more. Does it work or is it too much?

I love the bright light that sort of blurs the edges a little in this one.

November 11, we went walking in the neighborhood and I snapped some pictures.  I really worked on positioning myself to get good results.

I didn’t do much to this one. I can’t even remember if I cropped it!

This one I know was cropped. I had leaves in the foreground that detracted from the rest of the image. I like the idea of having several layers to an image but those leaves were one layer too many. I think the green they brought was too vivd.

I took 5-6 pictures of this little waterfall from different angles.

I have two versions of the next photo.  The original isn’t as sharp as I would like. I think it’s because of the digital zoom?  I had the same issue with the waterfall.  It’s not perfectly sharp like the two previous images.  I find it isn’t absolutely horrendous in the waterfall image but it does more significant harm to the next one.  I wanted to get a photo of a duck but it was kind of far away and I couldn’t get nearer.  So I zoomed in.  And he was still kind of small and lost in that image so I cropped it.  I made two versions, one with just the value curve adjusted and one that I tried sharpening.  Which is best?

No sharpening

Sharpened

That small, the difference is subtle but blow them up!  You’ll see.  Well, no matter what, I think these make the case for getting a lovely DSLR with a lovely zoom (hint, hint, Mr. Mouse!)

About deuxsouriceaux

Creative mommy at home to two wonderful little girls, trying to juggle family, sewing, exercise, family, knitting, photography, and did I mention family?