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Thursday, March 21, 2013

Ceanothus photos: any suggestions?

Here are some garden pix of Ceanothus in bloom. The blues don't really pop as much as they do in real life.

At the recent Tree of Life Nursery Spring Plant Sale, there was a rather professional-looking photographer and I asked him how to get the cobalt color. He suggested my photos were overexposed and to start manually adjusting the exposure - not relying on the "point and click" settings already programmed into my Canon PowerShot A640 10 megapixels camera.

Is this what's going wrong with my photos? Any ideas or suggestions?

Ceanothus griseus horizontalis ‘Yankee Point’ 

Ceanothus griseus horizontalis ‘Yankee Point’ (front), Ceanothus ‘Concha’ (back)

Ceanothus griseus horizontalis ‘Yankee Point’ (front), Ceanothus ‘Concha’ (back)

Ceanothus ‘Concha’

The second and fourth photos are typical of what my shots look like - the blue is attractive, but not the fall-in-love-with color that stops my heart when I walk by them.

Is it time of day? Settings? Overexposing? 

2 comments:

  1. Susan,

    Didn't your camera come with the "ZoomBrowser EX" software? It was included with my Canon SX 40. If it did, you can load the software onto your computer; there is a great deal you can do to "manipulate" under/over exposed images, to intensify color and contrast.

    If your camera came with NO software, you can try one of the Microsoft programs that should already be on your computer. You can also do this...

    Go to START [big button in the lower left-hand corner of your screen], click on "All programs", scroll to "accessories" and open up "paint". You can also access the "Windows Photo Gallery" from the same "start" menu. There, you can change the image quality, color, contrast, etc.

    Go to "image" ["in the "paint" program] and click on that. Click on "file" [in the upper L/H corner] and chose your file/photo. There, you can re-size your photo and manipulate it, to some extent.


    Hope this helps!

    Alain...Valley Center

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. BTW,

      How do you post photos on this blog? I don't see a "help" icon anywhere t assist the uninformed.

      Alain

      Delete