Experimenting

The prevailing southeasterly winds raged around the city bowl the entire weekend, snapping branches off trees and shrubs, driving dust under doors and through minute gaps in the windowframes.  Several of my newly planted petunias were blown clean out of the soil and the garden today looks pretty parched and battered.  This morning the wind has dropped and, as usual, it's a swelteringly hot day.  You'll find that Capetonians are pretty evenly divided between those who prefer the wind to the heat  - we know what happens when it stops.  I actually prefer winter above all!

As the gusts of wind made it difficult to stand upright, let alone take sharp pictures, I thought I would try a little experimentation on a couple of spare pix.   I call this image Wood, Stone, Brick.  It was cropped from a larger photo because I liked the effect of the sunbeams falling on the different surfaces.

The next picture was taken in Cape Town's new Biodiversity Gardens at Greenpoint and I'll do a post about this in the near future.  My point of departure was an oversaturated and underexposed photo, with nasty greens and blues, as a result of forgetting to change from the John S Filter on the Hipstamatic App.

 First, I lightened the exposure and applied a fairly hefty dose of blur.

I quite liked the  watercolour effect that this produced, so I tinkered around and cropped the image to just the people on the bridge.

I also tried a black and white version with selective colour ...

... but finally came to the conclusion that adding the Toaster filter to the image worked best of all.