This is the River Torrens which flows past our campsite and all the way into central Adelaide. We walked into town last week following the river, and have visited the Museum and Gallery of Art with Blan, an old friend of Karen’s mum. It must be said Adelaide has an abundance of parkland. Even the city centre itself is circled twice by a figure eight of gardens. A green belt in the true sense of the word, although I am sure it is a lovely place to live, job opportunities here seem to be fairly limited. We have booked one more week in our current campsite as we still have a few things to see and do in the city. Unless we strike lucky with a job we will probably start down the Great Ocean Drive towards Melbourne at the end of the month.

This is Belton Park in Lincolnshire, UK. It was the first chance to test out my new Canon 5D Mark II. It’s nice to be using a camera without a schizophrenic auto focus for a change.  The Mark II has been out for three years now and many believe a mark III will be announced soon. The good news is Canon have dropped the price of the Mark II recently which means you can get a lot of camera for your money.

To process this image I used the HSL/Grayscale tab in Camera RAW. This lets you change the saturation of individual colours. For this image the purple of the background flowers could be increased without over saturating the yellows in the grass.

This is Elvaston Castle in Derbyshire, UK. The original image was a little underexposed in the shadow areas. I used Fill Light in Camera RAW to bring back some detail. Lens Correction was also used to straighten the walls.

This was taken on a family holiday to Wales in 2010. I used Camera RAW to process this image. I like to show what setting I use for each post unfortunately “Print Screen” does not record anything when the Camera RAW dialogue is open in Photoshop. I’ve managed to get round this by using “Problem Step Recorder” This is a bit of software which is included in Windows 7 and takes a screen grab each time the mouse is clicked. It saves them as heavily compressed jpegs but it is the only way I can show the settings I have used. I replaced the sky with part of this image because I wanted some more blue in it.

This is Braunston in Rutland, UK. It is a beautiful old English village. To make it look a little older I removed all the pylons, wires, concrete and tarmac. To add some colour to the sky I used the color range tool to select the bright areas of the sky. This selection was used to create a mask which was applied to a gradient. The Blend mode Multiply was used as this is the most forgiving when it comes to masks of light colours over dark colours. A rough mask set to Multiply will not cover the branches or leave a halo. The worst that can happen is the thinnest branches get a slight hint of blue. Even this could be argued as a natural effect of soft focus so the end result looks natural.

We went for a walk in Rutland today. Karen spotted these Crocuses outside a cottage. I have used Orton Effect and Desaturation layers in an attempt to make the flowers stand out of the busy background.

This is the Eden Project in Cornwall. The Image is an example of how you can simulate Tilt-shift photography in order to create the look of a miniature scene. Essentially you create a narrow band of focus to mimic the effect of angling the sensor/film. You can use this site to automatically make your own tilt shift images. It seems to work best with wide angle shots when you are looking down on a scene with variety of foreground and background. The Sandpit is a great example of a tilt-shift video in which they have speeded up the playback to add to the miniature effect.

This is Llyn Lldaw on the way down from the Snowdon Peak in Wales. To process the image I used Vibrance instead of Saturation to bring the colour out of the bleak landscape. I then used various masks and adjustment layers add a bit more drama to each area of the image. High Resolution image is available here.

I remember thinking this Shetland Pony was carrying a little extra weight. The mystery was solved when she introduced this new foal to us. To process this pair of images I used 3 adjustment layers to make the images match. I then added one more curve layer to bring out some detail in their dark faces.

This is Kedleston Hall Bridge in Derbyshire. I chose this shot because it reminded me of an oil painting by John Constable. I used a curves layer to bring out the grass in the foreground and a levels layer to make the sky more dramatic. The black and white areas in the layer pallet show the masks which are used to ensure each effect only changes specific areas of the image.