Photo: The Silent Bouquet

The Silent Bouquet — a quiet batch of roses

These roses refuse to make a sound. You can see the rose in the middle wants to speak up, but is too afraid. These flowers were at Publix. They were on the top shelf in the floral department, so I held the camera up high and just guessed at the composition. Several guesses later, I had this.

I made the colors a lot cooler to make the image feel cold and uninviting, just like you’d feel around someone who refuses to speak. Then, I toned down the color, added contrast, and darkened the edges.

Canon Rebel XTi, EF 50mm 1:1.4, 1/160, F2.8, 50mm, ISO100, 2008-07-12T12:22:13-04, 20080712-162213rxt

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Please credit me as “Photo by Richard Thripp” or something similar.

Photo: Glass Rain

Glass Rain — torrential rain on the windshield at night, with stop lights

Torrential rain on the windshield at night, with stop lights. This is with a lot of droplets on the windshield, and traffic lights and oncoming traffic ahead. Neat patterns, the droplets made.

For editing, I darkened it all a lot, added contrast to push the whites to the limit, and desaturated a bit. Enjoy.
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Buy a 4*6 copy for $0.95 (USA only). Lustre finish. After adding, go to your shopping cart.

Canon Rebel XTi, EF 50mm 1:1.4, 1/400, F2, 50mm, ISO1600, 2008-07-16T22:28:56-04, 20080717-022856rxt

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Please credit me as “Photo by Richard Thripp” or something similar.

Photo: Real Beauty

Real Beauty — fake pink flowers

An arrangement of beautiful pink flowers and green fern leaves with perfect lighting. All synthetic, of course. But whose to say that makes them less valuable? They sure last longer, for one thing.

Editing involved adding contrast and burning the edges. It was hard to keep the colors in gamut as these are hard to print, but I solved it by toning them down and then selectively re-adding saturation where it would turn out best.

Canon Rebel XTi, EF 50mm 1:1.4, 1/80, F2.8, 50mm, ISO400, 2008-07-12T10:24:02-04, 20080712-142402rxt

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Please credit me as “Photo by Richard Thripp” or something similar.

Photo: Red Candy

Red Candy — tasty red flowers in the woods

I came across these delectable flowers on an evening walk. Just had to have them. I positioned the camera to have some palm frond leaves on the sides as a frame, and then snapped away. In Photoshop, I darkened everything but the flowers, desaturated all the color channels except red, and burned the corners especially. An eye-catching effect. Selective coloring is often tacky, but I hope I’ve done a good job of it here.

Canon Rebel XTi, EF 50mm 1:1.4, 1/50, F2.8, 50mm, ISO100, 2008-07-10T19:43:55-04, 20080710-234355rxt

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Please credit me as “Photo by Richard Thripp” or something similar.

Photo: Sunrays 4

Sunrays 4 — deep blue sunrays break through the clouds

A brilliant sunset with deep blue sunrays. Shot this through the windshield from my Grandma’s car. The colors were interesting, and the contrast and light patterns beautiful.

Editing involved noise reduction, heaps of added contrast and darkening, and lots of burning on the upper-right quadrant. Enjoy!

Canon Rebel XTi, EFS 18-55mm, 1/2000, F3.5, 18mm, ISO100, 2008-07-11T17:25:14-04, 20080711-212514rxt

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Please credit me as “Photo by Richard Thripp” or something similar.

More of the Sunrays series.

Everything is Stock

In the past six hours, I’ve released 53 of my photos as royalty-free stock. Check out the stock gallery to see them all. This means that every photo I’ve published is free for anyone to use. Quite a milestone, I must admit.

All the photos in the portfolio (about page 2 of the stock gallery at the moment) have source images now. I’ve linked to them in each post. So you can get right to the source of things, be it a JPEG (stuff with my older cameras) or .cr2 RAW (from my Canon Rebel XTi). This is great for digital artists. I can’t think of anyone who is doing what I do: putting countless hours into crafting beautiful and artistic photos (hopefully), and then releasing both the edited and original versions for free to all. Even if you just want to see what kinds of files the cameras I use produce, it’s a great resource.

Anyway, I didn’t post source images for the 53 photos I just posted… because my FTP client keeps timing out on the uploads. Maybe it’s SYN Hosting’s fault; I’m not sure. But I’ll come back to that. The source files should roll in at about 400MB, because RAW files are big. Update: I uploaded them overnight and added links to each post. Every stock photo that’s edited has a source image now!

I’ve already noticed that traffic, particularly bandwidth usage, has spiked. Check out these stats:

lots of bandwidth used

That’s how much bandwidth Thripp.com has been using in megabytes per day over the past week. That’s a tenfold increase on the 15th compared to the 14th. Granted, this isn’t drilled down to this particular blog, but I’ve been the most visited one on the Thripp.com network as of late, so it’s safe to say the stock images are being widely downloaded. Thanks everyone! I can go up to 4GB per day safely… then I’ll consider offloading them to a secondary server, because I only get 120GB a month on SYN Hosting.

This is the time to institute some changes going forward. My previous method of posting a photo and then a separate source image has worked well for a long time. It was just last month that I started giving everything away as a stock resource, so it was a fine plan to make new posts for each stock photo instead of adding it only to the old ones where no one would see them. But now that everything’s up to speed (i.e. all the photos are also released as stock), it’s time for a shift. From now on, there will only be one post for each photo, and that post will link to both the edited JPEG stock image and source JPEG or .cr2 file, plus include any 4*6 for-sale versions if applicable. The 8*10’s will stay separate for thumbnailing convenience and because I don’t have many. I won’t make JPEGs for source images with the border and title anymore; just a link to the real source image. This is inconvenient if you want to take a quick look to see my edits (my camera’s raw files can be up to 13MB), but it’s less work for me and it’s worth it because not many people used the old source image function anyway.

I don’t mind the old posts staying the way they are, because it’s historical, it’s different, and it served Brilliant Photography well for many months. I’m looking forward to doing things differently with new photos later today. Must sleep now. :neutral:

Thanks everyone!

Photo: Rift in the Clouds

Rift in the Clouds — black sunshine and white clouds in a dramatic sky

A cool-looking sky that crossed my eyes in the yard one evening. I shot this with my wide-angle (a.k.a. kit) lens, zooming in a bit to exclude the surrounding trees. Just sky. It’s like a rift is about to split the clouds from the sky and destroy the planet. It looks like there are sunrays about the clouds, but instead of being brighter, they’re dark, quite interestingly.

Quick and fun post-processing on this one. I switched to black and white, added contrast, then burned in the corners and dark parts around the clouds. Same for the black sunrays. Makes for a dramatic photo. The scene was dramatic to start, but it takes tweaking to replicate the drama on-screen.

Canon Rebel XTi, EFS 18-55mm, 1/1600, F3.5, 24mm, ISO100, 2007-09-13T17:53:49-04, 2007-09-13_21h53m49

Location: Thripp Residence, Ormond Beach, FL  32174-7227

Download the high-res JPEG or download the source image.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Please credit me as “Photo by Richard Thripp” or something similar.

Photo: Driving Raindrops

Driving Raindrops — raindrops on the windshield, on a foggy morning

Raindrops on the windshield of a car, on a foggy morning. I took this while Dad was driving; you can see the headlights of oncoming cars in the background. Photos like these are why I’m glad I always am fiddling with the camera; I could just ignore them, or relegate my photography to scheduled times, but I’d miss great opportunities (The Irrationality of Apportionment).

This one did well with editing. There were specks of dirt on the windshield, but they couldn’t stay. It was bluish out, but I switched to black and white. I added contrast. I removed droplets that were ugly or distracting, while being careful to not make the clone marks visible, even if they could only be revealed through editing with levels. I did this by using the levels tool to darken the image significantly, then going back and cleaning up the parts I saw that looked spotty. That was for the streaks that were on the windshield in the bright part of the sky.
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Buy a 4*6 copy for $0.95 (USA only). Lustre finish. After adding, go to your shopping cart.

Canon Rebel XTi, EFS 18-55mm, 1/160, F5.6, 54mm, ISO200, 2007-09-28T07:52:34-04, 2007-09-28_11h52m34

Download the high-res JPEG or download the source image.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Please credit me as “Photo by Richard Thripp” or something similar.

Photo: Raindrops 3: Chaos in the Rain

Raindrops 3 — a landscape of raindrops

A wide-angle shot of a chaotic storm. The water is rolling off the roof above, which you can see at the top of the frame. I liked the feel of the scene.

I desatured 100% and added contrast with the curves tool, being careful not let the whites clip by watching my histogram. I didn’t mind losing details in the shadows, though.

Canon Rebel XTi, EFS 18-55mm, 1/2500, F4, 18mm, ISO800, 2007-09-19T14:18:53-04, 2007-09-19_18h18m53

Location: Thripp Residence, Ormond Beach, FL  32174-7227

Download the high-res JPEG or download the source image.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Please credit me as “Photo by Richard Thripp” or something similar.

More of the Raindrops series.

Photo: Raindrops 2

Raindrops 2 — sharp droplets, captured in motion in black and white

Raindrops coming off the roof of one of our sheds during a storm, with a background of trees and sky. This was one of the first shots I took with my Canon Rebel XTi last year; it’s so much more flexible than a point-and-shoot because you can freeze motion like this even in fairly low light. I like how the swirly drops turned out.

Same editing as Raindrops 1: added contrast and converting to black and white. No spot editing needed, which is always nice.

Canon Rebel XTi, EFS 18-55mm, 1/4000, F4, 25mm, ISO800, 2007-08-10T15:32:14-04, 2007-08-10_19h32m14

Location: Thripp Residence, Ormond Beach, FL  32174-7227

Download the high-res JPEG or download the source image.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Please credit me as “Photo by Richard Thripp” or something similar.

More of the Raindrops series.