our ‘girls’ are doing just fine

The past few days have been warm enough that I’ve been out in the pool with my wife doing our water therapy. That’s been ongoing since last Friday afternoon when I came home from work. It’s warm enough that even the girls come out and lounge by the pool.Ruby turned 10 back in August. She still has that big, beautiful Lab head, and her ears are still in perfect form. But Labs begin to turn white around their muzzle and head. If you look carefully, you can see white shading into the standard light ginger color of a Yellow lab, and especially under her eyes, down the muzzle, and to her mouth. We’ve owned both Chocolate and Black Labs, and when they went white it stood out against their dark coats. But Yellows don’t have that “issue” and you can’t tell they’re turning white due to age unless you look very carefully…
Annie’s a Doodle with a Standard Poodle’s coat. She’s nearly four (her birthday is Valentine’s day) so she should be really coming into her own. Unfortunately, Annie’s coat already has all sorts of color scattered across her black coat, from silver to ginger. You can see the ginger color on her muzzle in the photo above. Having never cared for a Doodle before I have no idea how she will age or how long she’ll live. But I hope she has a good long life like every other Lab we’ve ever had, which is on average between 15 and 16 years.

home garden photography, day 2

Today was another glorious central Florida day. The high was 84F, the sun was out, and little fluffy clouds in the blue sky. I worked around the house as well as the yard. During all this activity, the camera came back out again to record some additional flowers. Same setup as yesterday, a Pen F with a Lumix G 30mm macro lens on a Benro tripod. Enjoy.

What’s interesting this time around is how I’m turning down default settings in Lightroom. In particular I’m turning sharpening down from 25 (out of a range from 0 to 100) to 10. I’m also playing a bit with saturation and luminance in the color channels, boosting them a tiny bit. This gives me the lush saturated colors in the flowers without having to push them through the external plugins. And by turning down the sharpening, what appears to be grain artifacts aren’t nearly pronounced in the images, especially in the out-of-focus areas. Today’s lenses and sensors are more than sharp enough without having to turn to Lightroom to play games sharpening them even more.