Walking photos

Thursday here again. Pete is ok for modest distance so we had a steady 4.5 mile geocaching trip from Cartmel finding six out of nine.

Following last week's dearth of photos I clicked more often. The weather was hot and sunny, not always the best for photography, but looking at the results was interesting. I know little about the finer points, but I do take all my photos through Photoshop and crop many and also use the enhancement features on most which allow:

1. Darken/lighten highlights (nearly always darken)
2. Lighten/darken shadows
3. Contrast (only used occasionally)

This day I took 13 pics and discarded two and created one new one to compare with the original. I felt no need to make any adjustments under the three above categories, and only cropped the one of the sunlight in the woods slightly, and the final one of Cartmel Priory to illustrate a point. I suppose the camera was having an easy time with default settings working well in perfect light conditions obviating my need to intervene afterwards.

This Panasonic DMC TZ40 is proving to be a good buy rendering realistic colour and impressively detailed and sharp zoom shots, even at 21 x, and with the neat advantage of fitting into an easily accessible, horizontal, velcro fastened pouch attached to my rucksack waist belt. That encourages  opportunistic snapping which is missed when the camera is stowed less conveniently.

CLICK FIRST PIC TO ENLARGE

Route started at the priory going clockwise

In Cartmel Priory grounds - location of our first geocache

Cartmel Priory

In the village - very touristy - lots of people about

Home of the original ubiquitous "sticky toffee pudding" now seen on nearly every pub menu in the country 

The interior of this construction was totally overgrown so no clues to its purpose - anybody any ideas? See the next pic. which details the cement rendered curved wall tops.

Howbarrow, 170m.
 It has a trig point which you can just see.
 The people were a family from Oregon in The States seeing more of our super country than many other visitors from abroad.
Pity about the electric transmission lines across the pic.

I seem to remember visiting here with Gimmer to stock up with veg. at the start of some expedition into the wilds. I think it has now closed down. Too remote even for the more ardent organicists?

This view of Cartmel Priory with Hampsfell in the background has been trashed with the modern building, the hideous portacabin thing and the car park, but below shows what can be achieved with a bit of cropping - what you see in the cropped photo is pleasing, but the real life view can't be avoided

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UPDATE - The unidentified shrub photo in my last post was Lavatera.

From Wikipedia:

Many Lavatera species have now been transferred to the related genus Malva. Lavatera species are known as tree mallows, or rather ambiguously as rose mallows, royal mallows or annual mallows.

Photoshop - layers

I have bought Photoshop’s Layers by Matt Kloskowski. This is the easiest to understand computer manual I have so far come across.

For the uninitiated, Photoshop is complex software enabling photograph manipulation, painting, and graphic design etc. In contrast to Matt’s manual it is devilishly unintuitive, but rewarding when one  masters some of its attributes relevant to your requirements.

Photoshop’s cornerstone  is a many faceted feature called layers, which seems to demand three dimensional lateral thinking to make it perform the task you require. Photoshop, like most software has its own vocabulary which often has no hint of the outcome for a named operation, or if there is a hint you nearly always have to set up some other parameter before you get what you want.

I have dabbled with Photoshop for a number of years, but my present restriction after a replacement knee operation five weeks ago has provided  the opportunity to explore further.

Matt’s manual  teaches you to do things the right way. I have already discovered quicker methods for some operations compared with my own laborious procedures.

The results below are hardly sophisticated, and were achieved in a fairly cavalier fashion - detail could easily be tidied, but I am not aiming for the front cover of a graphic design magazine at the moment. These efforts have been constructed using only photographs. In previous posts I have shown examples of free painting using Photoshop, which is a much more creative format.

Creative possibilities are only limited by one’s own imagination, and of course skill in operating the software.

"The bloke in the pub said there were dinosaurs in these woods"

"I think that chap in the tent has a Cornish pasty - I'm off over there"

Not for the squeamish

Well, I had my knee op clips removed today, and I see the physio tomorrow at the hospital.  I am now walking without crutches, but there is still some pain, especially when I do my four times a day exercises. I mentioned before that some people keep the clips as a memento, and in fact the nurse asked me if that was my intention. I had suggested putting them on Ebay in my last post, but then I had a better idea, sparked by my use of the via ferrata simile, and enabled by time on my hands to devote to a lot of faffing about with Photoshop.

Yes, I know that on a via ferrata the rope wouldn't be used like this, but it just adds to the pic here.

A more sparrow-hawky sparrow hawk

This one is for Afoot in the Hills http://afootinthehills.blogspot.co.uk/ in response to his post dated 14th March which included his pic of a sparrow hawk. I have played with the pic in Photoshop, and here is the result:

Back in the groove

I returned from my Welsh walk on 17th June to face post accounting for a fair sized forest, a garden suitable for the making of African Queen, and over eight hundred photos to sort. 

Most of that post is now in the waste paper recycling bin, phase one of garden taming is complete after zero offers from film companies, and the photos are down to five hundred and eighty, most of which have been processed through Photoshop at the basic level of light adjustment and cropping.  I have added captions where appropriate and created a title pic for each of the fifty eight days.

Yesterday I started with the production of my sixth book using the Internet self publishing site Lulu. 

Research has started on a walk for next year, if my aged joints will permit, but more of that later, suffice to say there are two possible routes which will be evaluated for distance and practicality, and, dare I say it in the face of earlier comments from BB, aesthetic value?

During the walk I could rarely remember to take pics on my iPhone to post on the blog, so here are eight photos to try and make up for that omission.

Please click to enlarge, especially number 7.

No idea what he is letting himself in for

I was invited into a private house to see this

The arty one