apple blossoms

Another shot with the P100 -- and although it looked pretty good out of the camera I played in Photoshop a bit -- cropped a little and played with adjustments trying to cut the glare from this rare sunny day.

I find that the P100 is iffy on focus.  I throw out more than I keep because they are blurry, and I haven't figured out why I can't get them all in focus.

magnolia

This was taken with my P100 -- carried in my bag when I'm driving around.

Another CS5 attempt -- turning a layer into a smart filter layer so you can go back and adjust the filters if you decide to do so.

tulips

It really is Spring!

It's been awfully wet here in NE Ohio, but it's good for the plants, I guess.
This was taken with my Canon and processed in CS5.

I've been plowing through some CS5 tutorials on http://www.lynda.com

and I discovered how little I know about Photoshop!

For starters I didn't appreciate how powerful Bridge is.
or what a cool browser mini-Bridge is!
And Camera Raw has more to offer than I realized.

impressionist filter

My old computer stopped "talking" to me and went to computer heaven.  Technology has sure changed since I bought that one!  I got an all-in-one HP Touchsmart.

My photos were all on an external hard drive and somewhere along the way I realized it would be a good idea to keep folders for things I added on to photoshop, but I still had/have a lot of stuff to move onto the new one.  I installed the extra fonts that I like, and just started looking at the filters.  I installed Tri-moon's impressionist filter.  It works with CS5, but not with CS5 64-bit.  That's OK because I have them both installed on the new computer.

So here's that same daffodil pic done with the impressionist filter.

Now I have to figure out how to add the rest of the stuff I've bought -- like the Topaz filters.

Springtime

Well, Spring is really here!

I wasn't particularly happy with this shot, so I spent some time in photoshop "enhancing" it.

Relationship

You'll get tired of seeing these birds pretty soon,
but here's a few I shot today with the Nikon P100.
The herons are developing relationships!

If it stays warm tomorrow and if I can find a time when the rain stays away, 

I'll take the Canon down there and see what I can capture with the 70-200 lens..

First -- renovation of the old abandoned nest.

Next -- bill and coo -- hey! the neighbors are watching!

And finally, just a couple of shots to show what the P100 can and can't do.

First with no zoom.

Then, zoomed in all the way -- isn't that amazing!

But the chromatic aberration is distracting to say the least,

so I converted this to black and white.

H is for heron

Spring is definitely trying to make an entrance!

There's still snow and ice on the ground, but the first of the

great blue herons have migrated back to their nesting ground.