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Photo: A de-saturated look at one of my previous beach photos.

Of all places to find inspiration for creative work in Photoshop, would you believe this one came from Windows XP?

I had this photo as my desktop background on my office machine – which unfortunately is still running the ancient operating system.  For those of you that might remember it, the Shut Down sequence fades your desktop to black and white in the background. And there you have it.

I couldn’t help but keep some of the color in the blue skies and a touch in the water, but always open to feedback.

– Kris

Photo: A different look at my Big Dipper image thanks to a cropping suggestion from Andy Beal.

What can I say, there may not be such a think as a “finished” image. After a great tip from Andy in yesterday’s Before and After post, I went back into the darkroom and spun this image out of Photoshop.  Many thanks to Andy for not only identifying the potential for a new look for the original image, but also for taking the time to leave a comment.

Moving Heaven and Earth

Okay, maybe just heaven.

My first attempt at this cropped version was a little off.  If you check the original image, you’ll notice that the right-most star in the Big Dipper constellation was actually captured to the right of the two chairs in the foreground. Now look at this image again.

Bet you wouldn’t have noticed it if I didn’t point it out, eh?

It was pretty easy to do, actually, by just duplicating the layer, moving it to the left and adding a gradient mask to blend it in.

Why Stop There?

I’m leaving this image as-is for now, since I like the simplicity of the scene and they well recognized Big Dipper – which was the reason I shot the scene in the first place.

At some point, I could take it a step further, and instead of the Big Dipper, I could swap it out for this image of the Milky Way I shot on Maui last September. The possibilities – like the universe in this case – truly are endless.

– Kris

Photo: Blackhawks defensemen Duncan Keith releases a blast from far boards.

Thinking of starting another hockey week by going through photos from old games and either retouching them or giving them a little creative adjustment like you see here.

It’s February already, and I have two Wolves games coming up near the end of the month with similar seats to those we had last time – nice and close. More details on that coming soon.

– Kris

As the latest edition of their Heritage Night series, the Chicago Blackhawks chose to honor fan favorite Jeremy Roenick in tonight’s game against the Sharks.  Since I grew up admiring JR during my playing days, I thought I’d dig up an old photo from the Hawks/Sharks match back in ‘08 and share it on the blog tonight.

By the way, Hawks won 4-3 in OT.

In my ever continuing quest for learning more about photography and the digital darkroom, I subscribe to my fair share of photography blogs (of which I probably should post a list someday). With so many great posts to read each day, it never really takes that much to find inspiration to try a few new things in my own work.  In reality, it happens a lot more often than me finding time to try any of them.

My latest such inspiration that was lucky enough to find a few late, late night hours to play around with came from this post from the very stunning photo blog, The Windy Pixel.

Here are a few of my early, not-as-stunning-as-theirs, creations.

As with anything in photography that involves good composition and exposures with strong skills in post-production, the sky is the limit, and for me it will be something I will only get better at as my skills in both areas improve.

Here are the source images that were used for the my creative works above.

Nicolet Beach in Peninsula State Park, WI

Stars over Ka’anapali Beach

Haleakala Sunrise Fans

Be sure to look for more of these from me in the coming months as I continue to practice with HDR and Topaz Adjust, too.