Oregon Coast Aquarium

Petting Pool: Here are a few images taken at the indoor petting tide pool. The color and tone of the green anemone was heavily edited. The abalone tone was done using the virtual photographer plug-in for Photoshop. And the 3rd shot is an urchin close up.





Tufted Puffin: One of many types of birds in the avary. This guy's massive eyebrows are breeding plumage to impress the chickie-poos. This guy was holding still so the image turned out pretty sharp, and using a monopod doesn't hurt.


Catterpillar: guess the aquarium ain't just of fish and fowl.


Oregon Trail ends here. A funny sign along Hwy 34, near the Toleto turn off.

Seal Rock

Seal Rock: This was our first time visiting at low tide. Here you can find sea stars (pictured above), anemone, urchins, crabs and everything else you'd expect from tide pools. Located south of Newport. Here's a site with some landscape views of the place.

Tide Pool Crustacean: Some type of weird sea bug one of the kids found. Not nearly as interesting as the crabs but at least this guy would hold still.

Nudibranch: found this tiny little guy in a tide pool browsing the sea weeds. For me this was one of the coolest things we found there.

Photos: Finley Refuge

Bird zone ahead. These photos taken at the Finley Wildlife Refuge, near Corvallis.

Wood Duck: on a log

Cucumber Beetle: early morning on a wild lupin

Photo: HgAnt

Carpenter Ant: a huge black worker on a plant potter. Edited in Photoshop, cool and warm quicksilver colors created by blending two layers using different Virtual Photographer (free) plug-in.

How To: Moody Clouds

A couple of people have asked how I got this moody image.
To be honest, it's a lot of trial and error, but these steps might help you get there faster if you're looking to make something similar.

Here's the starting canvas as it appears from the camera.I was trying to get a wide shot of a great blue heron in there that you can't really see.

The biggest step in getting moody clouds is a curves adjustment layer set to Linear Burn. As you can see, with the mask turned off the tree line is really dark, so I masked out selected parts using gradient fill - both linear and radial gradients. These give me smoother results than doing it by hand with a brush, but I'm too picky.

Next up, a Gradient Map layer to tint the scene. You can get some great sky color gradients from Adobe's exchange site. A gradient map just reasigns your image's lights and darks to colors along the color grade. I like to use these to get that slight unnatural color look. In this case I masked it out to just the tree area since I liked the clouds better as they were.

The other curves layer was just an auto-adjustment to pull out the blacks and a Hue layer to punch up the saturation just a little.

Here's the final image.

Of course, in making this it wasn't such a linear process. I'd add a curve layer and step through all the blending modes (multiply, overlay, etc) until something cought my eye. Then I'd try something else like the gradient map. Then went back and masked out parts of the curve layer to pop out parts of the treeline. All trial and error.

Just play around until you get something you like.

Photos: Quail & Hummer

I finally got a decent quail photo. Taken at the William L. Finley National Wildlife Refuge, from the driver's seat of my car. He was trying to sneak around behind and I managed to fire off this 1 snapshot.


Hummer on the in-law's feeder. A rufus I believe.


Another typical dandelion photo.

Photos: Macro Yard

Some more macro photos from our surban yard, here in Corvallis.


Milkweed Bug: no, that's not blue sky but rather a dog dish. It pays to plan your backdrops.


Crab Spider: trying to make a web on a fresh pine tree sprout.


Fly: Eating another fly on a flower, hmmm ... I didn't know they did that.


Butterfly: A tiny butterfly in the backyard. Angie spotted this while I was mowing the lawn. Glad I grabbed the camera, nice setup.


Ant: a common black ant on a pest infested leaf. I liked the pattern in the leaf so I added some color using photo filters. Just wish the ant had more detail.