Blog Assigment #2...Reflections

This past weeks blog assignment was working with reflections. I thought I would really struggle with this assignment because this past week has probably been one of the busiest for me with family in town and military commitments. Finding the time to schedule myself in was definitely at a premium, but what I am finding with these assignments and enjoying more than anything else is that I look at my little world with a new set of goggles on every week. As long as I have my camera with me, I always have the chance to stumble upon something that fits the theme of the week and I have become more aware of what I find interesting around me and how I can present it in a photographic form that you might not have seen before. So here are a few from this past week.

This first one hubby graciously let me use him as my model. He is looking out at our son Logan and I love that you can see and feel the happiness and pride that he feels seeing our son teeter towards him on the sand. ISO was 100, aperture was f/3.2 and shutter speed was 1/500 sec.



Yes, another ferris wheel picture!! But we were showing my in-laws the active oceanfront that Virginia Beach has to offer and these puddles in the parking lot showed off a beautiful reflection of the ferris wheel.



This last one I thought I'd throw in here so I can give you a little photoshop tip! Have you ever taken a picture that should have a gorgeous reflection in the water but the water just seems kind of blah? Usually there is just enough wind to mess your perfect reflection picture up. This was a sunset over the pond by our house and the original picture actually had a very pretty reflection in it already, but I thought it would be a good one to practice this on. I used the rectangle marquee tool (which by the way I'm using CS3 for my edits) and I selected the upper half of the photo from the water line and copied and pasted it so I'd have a double layer (You can also make a new layer of it by clicking Ctrl-J, but I wanted to be able to delete a good portion of it to show the brush in the foreground). Then either right click or hit Ctrl-T for free transform, then right click again and click on Flip Vertical. You can change the opacity to see enough of the layer underneath to place it in the right position then I just started deleting around the edges to bring back some of the foreground. If you had constraints in the picture that you wanted to only bring out the reflection on (like a defined shoreline) you could use the one of the lasso tools to define that constraint (hide the reflected layer first) and then use those constraints to "paint" back in the reflection so it keeps the neat shoreline. I didn't have those constraints in this picture because I was right on the water's edge taking the picture so you can't see where the water meets land in the foreground.