The Black Effect

The Black Effect. Sounds so dramatic. Thing is, I don't even know if there is such a phenomenon as The Black Effect. I soley created it up here becuase it sounds effective for these pictures. Since I made it up, what do I mean by it? The Black Effect, in this case, defines as a silhouette that has been taken with movement.

What is this? A picture! Of course it's a picture, but what's the picture have on it? THE BLACK EFFECT! Haha, well there is a short story behind this picture. I woke up a lot later than expected, which meant I was late. I rushed and sped through my morning routine, and then hopped into the car. Literally. That's when I notice the beautiful sunrise in the distance. The sky was blasted with all sorts of colors. From the yellow-orange you see there, out to a purple. All those colors were just calling for a picture. Which meant I had to think of a way to enhance the colors a little bit, instead of just taking a plain picture of the sky. As I passed by trees after trees, I thought, why not trees? And here you see the colors beautified by the trees. The silhouette brings out the colors in the back, really making it pop out. What I did not expect was the show of movement. I expected the scene to just freeze, which would need fast shutter speed. You can see the motion with the blurred ground and even the slightly blurred trees in the back.

What do we have in this picture? Skiiers! Of course you see skiiers, but where are the skiiers? On a skii lift. And skii lifts are in motion right? Which leads us to... THE BLACK EFFECT! This picture has a short story as well... We were skiing and I took this picture while on the skii lift. My buddy next to me was creeped out because it was dark, the skii lift creaked, there were lights in intervals, and the lights were green! It wasn't really green but for some reason, it looks green here. Another question for you...did I take this picture in front or behind me? I took this behind me, which ended up being great for a silhouette. So where can you see motion in this? The right side is blurred ever so slighty. The lift wasn't going fast enough to get a good blur. Also, I edited this a bit. You can tell by the dust specks and the tear in the middle. I added those in, and it gives this old look. 

Bethany beach in January

Back to our last vacation of 2014! Our last day of 2014 was well spent. We had too much fun and stayed up too late. The first day of 2015 was also well spent. I took two more trips to the beach throughout the day, both in which I took pictures for you here-

You know when the tide runs high, it leaves a heap of rocks and shells a little farther into the beach? This was that heap of pebbles and whatever may be hiding underneath. It has a nice field of depth, clear in the front and blurry the farther you go out. 

Whaaaat is happening here??? Looks interesting huh? Well here's a trick I recently learned through editing. First, this is a pile of pebbles. Then by editing, I layered the same picture on top, but it's upside down so that it's not layering the same thing. Then, I made the second layer rather transparent, which makes you wondering... Whaaat is going on. It's just something cool I found out.

Check out the beach! So calm...but you can't see the waves washing up on shore. Anyway, this was the view coming out from the boardwalk. 

If you look over the previous picture, this picture was taken right from that. There's really good clarity. You can see the immense detail on the wood, and the background is blurred out. The blurred background emphasizes the wood and you can sort of see the wood glowing. It seems as though there is some white light coming from directly behind the wood. The only thing I would have edited more is to crop out the little wood piece showing on the left, 

It's funny how much people take pictures of objects, but what about shadows? Shadows are the huge thing that people avoid in their pictures as much as possible. For once, we have the thing that follows one anywhere they go. I want to point out one thing when I edited this picture. The app I use allows me to add this effect called a light leak. It allows me to add "fake light" into the picture. In my opinion, they work best on people pictures when there is a lot of light. I decided to try it out here becuase it gives some color to the shadow, rather than the usual black. 

Here is the same picture from my other post but edited differently. I added a different filter and blurred out the top and bottom of the picture. (It blurred out the moon!) This makes you look dead center into the picture. On top of that, it really emphasizes the boardwalk.

Hope you enjoyed these pictures and learned a few cool tricks for editing pictures. Happy 2015! 

Bethany Beach in December

Happy new year guys! I hope you all have an awesome new year and resolved to keep snapping some pics this year! :) 

Well, at the beach again! But not so far south this time. We landed in Bethany Beach, Delaware, about a three hours drive. Our family along with about seven other families stayed in a huge beach house for three days. The weather wasn't terrible, nor was it too warm. All the same, we had an awesome time!

This was actually the front door of the house. I took this picture from outside, so you are seeing the window and the curtain. Then you can see the trees behind me from the reflection on on the window. It's pretty cool because if you are looking at the top left of the picture, you tend to focus on the reflection, but if you are looking at the bottom right, you see the curtain. You can call it a two-layered picture. 

This is a picture that my awesome friend took, and I cropped it out alot at the top (people were walking by). I wanted this picture in here because it shows great field of depth. Blurry in the back and very detailed and clear in the front. 

Here we have the boardwalk type thing leading to the beach. When we went to the beach that day, the sky was just beautiful. We took some portrait pictures and the background just looked fake becuase it was too good. The sky had this canvas going from the richest blue down to a yellow-orange. The ocean too was really rich and extremely calm. You can see a little color starting to form here, but I took this picture before the sky was painted. If you look at the top of the picture, the moon made it in!

Here we have some beach houses and just sand. I wanted to point out the depth of field once again. The sand right in front of me is in a lot of detail. It gets blurrier the farther you go, but the houses are in focus. If you observed the sand, you can tell that it rained the day before because the sand is in some crazy texture. 

This was also at the beach the same day. There was this ridge of sand a little farther away from the waves. Erosion in action. In general, this is a pretty cool picture because it's got some neat edits. 

That was the first time we went to the beach that trip, which was on the 31st. I know, the last day of the year was well spent. I went to the beach two more times, so I've got more pictures coming up. I have to say, it was cold the first time we went. Absolutely super cold and windy. All of us stayed up to the point where we couldn't take another picture because our hands were just too cold. Literally. We ended up wearing layers and gloves and hats and scarves and... boots on the sand  :)

Christmas Lights

Hey! Happy New Year! I hope you all have a fresh start to a wonderful year to come! Well over the past holidays, I've tried out a few Christmas pictures. I always get inspired by those really fancy Christmas tree pictures and I decided to try one out myself. I did have to research a bit to have a good idea on what to set the camera settings to and just how to take the pictures. It took a while to get it right.

Here was my first attempt. With no research or any idea of what I was doing. Just a blue light on the tree. And we have this really old, fake tree with LED lights, not the incandescent white or multi-colored ones. Those are on the stairs right next to the tree. 

This was the second attempt with some background knowledge now. You have to be pretty far away from the lights, and from the subject itself. This picture is decent, except the ornament could have been in focus much better. Notice that there's a light switched on at the right. It's not on in any picture, and having lights on in a room can make a difference. 

Here we have a light with lights in the background. The light is wrapped around the stairs on the side. So it was far enough from the tree to have a blurred light background. The technical term for this would be "bokeh" pictures, meaning "the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light".

This is a white light hanging from the stairs. Plus, I took in the brightness of the light unlike the picture above. Notice the blurred lights on the tree are smaller than in the picture above. 

Here are just the lights from the christmas tree alone. You can make out the shape of the tree with the lights. (The Christmas tree is sideways.)

The lights here are bigger and more blurred. In my opinion, the smaller lights look better than these bigger ones. (The tree is sideways.)

Here I have the lights from the tree and from the stairs on the right. I could've made this a much better picture by straightening some things out. Making the stairs lights straight and not tilted. Adding a subject to the picture. Clearing up the lights on the tree, or even adding more lights because it looks awkward having only lights in two sections of the picture. 

This is a similar picture to the one right above. In this picture, the lights are much smaller, and the overall picture is zoomed out. 

Now that there's a better understanding of how to do a bokeh, it'll be much easier to take them later on. Although, I know I need a lot more experience, it's not that easy at first. Try it out for yourself! 

By the Sand in November

Hello! Ever take those jumping-up pictures at the beach? Or anywhere? If you take a peek at the bottom, you can see that my cousin and I took a few. We took some at the beach as well as the sand dunes (called Jockey's Ridge) that we visited. I thought our beach pictures were cooler, so I posted them here. 

Here we have my cousin and I jumping up. My Uncle took this picture, for I am obviously in the picture.  There are a few things I want to point out. There are a couple distractions, such as the people in the distance and the dune at the very right. I could have simply cropped all of that out, but then the silhouettes would be in the center of the picture. Following the rule of thirds, it would look better if the subjects weren't placed directly in the middle. So... I left the picture the way it is, although I can edit out the people. There's a heap of detail in this picture. I'm talking about how filling the clouds are, contrasted to the calm sea and smooth sand. It all looks so dramatic and gives a charm, but it does take away from the subject,

Here is my cousin, posing for me. She wanted me to take a picture of her, so she decided on jumping up. I was so surprised because she did some awesome pose that looks great in a silhouette. Despite the fact that it did take a few tries because she needed to perfect the pose and I needed to make sure the settings on the camera was good. Oh, and when you take pictures of quick action (such as jumping in the air), make sure its on sports mode (so that it can snap pictures quickly). 

These cattail plants are in a silhouette too. Just a little. You can still see some color and detail on the plants. It portrays the plants at the beach pretty well. I could have effortlessly taken a picture of the plants without the beach, but then it makes you wonder... where did you take this picture?

This picture was taken right behind our house. The path continues up to the left, leading up to the beach. If you noticed, this picture was comparably brighter than all the previous ones. I did edit and add more exposure. Plus, the sun is not focused as in the other pictures. 

Here's more of the wooden pathway/boardwalk. Now with this picture, I edited it a little, adding more temperature. This brought a lot of warmth to the picture overall. I also had to be careful not to put my own shadow in the picture, since the sun was to my back. 

And that concludes my time at North Carolina in November. I have to say,our relatives and I had a great time together. Four days that were lively and entertaining. Many memories were made, and so many can be remembered thanks to the multiple cameras that took pictures. Remember, keep clicking!

By an Island in November

Continuing the trip to North Carolina...

Here we have a boardwalk to the beach. This was actually not the boardwalk from our beach house. This was at this island named, Ocracoke Island. It's this really nice, long island, about an hour away by ferry. The temperature looks really nice doesn't it? I think it was just about the worst the whole week. It was extremely windy and just too cold. So the wind was actually pushing us to the ocean, but it was really bad on the way back. Another interesting point is the vanishing point in this picture. You can draw your audience into looking at what you want. Here, the first this the audience looks at is the vanishing point. (Where the boardwalk seems to have no end and then disappear. This picture is not the best example of a vanishing point though.)

My cousin who came from California is modeling for me in this picture. Haha, he's not actually modeling for me... He just decided to run past me and I decided to take a picture of that. It's pretty cool because you can now see the waters and the sand. 

Here, I actually made him model for me. I just told him to look at the ocean, and he did. I personally thought this would be a nice picture to edit completely. Usually, I just adjust the basics to make it look better. With this picture, I made the entire picture black-and-and-white expect for my cousin and the steps. The sand, water, and sky are grayed out. 

This is the beach at Ocracoke as well. The waters were so surprisingly blue and calm, yet it was so cold. 

 I took this picture just a little farther to the right. I found a decent sized shell with the waves in the background.

Ocracoke is famous for it lighthouse. Whats so famous about the lighthouse? Welll... it's the oldest one in North Carolina. That's all. Notice how blue the sky is... yet it was so sunny and cold. 

Here, I have an abstract array of colors. This was a reflection on a window, showing the reflection as well as whats happening outside (which is why there's green). You can actually a persons head at the top and a building in the left upper corner. Where do you think this was taken?

These row of houses sat a couple blocks away from ours. Every time we passed by it, it reminded me of the Painted Ladies in California. Except, these row of houses are so much smaller. It's probably a one or two roomed house with a garage in the back. If you can tell, this is edited just a little bit. I tried to edit these photos like the Painted Ladies pictures when I went to California this past summer. 

This was taken from inside our beach house on the last day we were there. That morning, the temperature was the best its been. It was warm, sunny, barely windy, and just great weather. Just check out the view from the deck... pretty awesome, huh? Wondering how the sun is peeking from above the doors? Well logic says... there's another window above the door, and you can see the whole room light up through the one window. It just looks like scene setter pictures right?

By the Beach in November

Hello! The wrath of winter is approaching super fast, isn't it? In order to avoid it for sometime, our cousins and my family made a trip down to North Carolina this past Thanksgiving. I'll tell you now, we had an awesome time, and surprisingly, the weather cooperated with us the whole time!

So we booked a beach house on the islands of the Outer Banks (off the coast of North Carolina). We stayed in a town called Hatteras for about four days . Hatteras is a beautiful town, and there are so many huge vacation houses. Although, when we went, the place was pretty out of season. We rented a huge house that had the beach in the back. This is the beach in November, peoples. Take it in. :)

Check this picture out! A tree rooted into the sand right on the beach! My cousin and I were taking a walk on the beach and we passed by this. We were like, "Hey look, its a tree! How fascinating!" ;) Well it's dead of course because trees as such cannot take in that much salt water. I guess it's just surprising to see a tree in the middle of nowhere on the beach. Now I admit, I cheated on this picture. You can tell I put a cool filter on it, but the picture looks pretty nice with it, right?

This was taken at a place called Jockey's Ridge. This is about an hour away from Hatteras but still on the chain of islands. This place is basically a miniature desert. It 's just a small place filled with huge sand dunes. Literally. Funny enough, on both sides of the dunes is water. (Huge sand dunes, which can be associated with deserts, aren't supposed to have water anywhere near them.) So in this picture, you can see these tiny mountains sticking out, and that comes from a storm from the previous day. This is just a different perspective for something so small. 

This is a picture on the dunes. You can see that it's a busy picture. The clouds are just stunning and looks full in this picture. Then you have the many footprints on the sand as well. The people silhouettes are in the middle. Actually, the spot where I took this picture is the perfect spot for silhouettes, except  it would've been a busy picture (the clouds and footprints). 

This was right next to the dunes, off to the side. The sand dunes were actually very very steep. Jockey's Ridge is actually know for awesome winds. We saw people gliding off the steeps dunes and people kite-flying as well. It's also perfect for sand-sledding, (sledding on sand instead of snow) which works better than sledding on snow, in my opinion.

This was one of my favorites. It's the porch and beach seen through those nets on a window. The angle in which I took it looks really cool. 

This was also the same porch scene. Although... I edited this one. This picture was just ugly before I edited it. I got this idea from one of my Uncles, and his picture looked amazing. It looked like it was taken off a postcard, plus it was taken on a phone. So I go ahead and try to take a similar picture, and this is what I get. I think what was wrong with mine is that the time of day isn't right. (Which affects the lighting) There's not much edited in this. I placed it under a filter and added a frame. 

I took the same view in a closer angle and I edited it intensely. No filters, only the basics. I added plenty of vibrancy, contrast, and reduced the highlights. There's also a small black vinaigrette frame on the edges. It's not that bad... but it's intense.  

This was the floor on the walkway to the beach. You can see the sand inbetween  the boards. This was nothing cool, just figured it would be a nice background/wallpaper.