Photo of the Week 2014-01-27

A "good old fashion Canadian winter storm" resulted in the closure of many highways and county roads in Southwestern Ontario this weekend. Included among them, Hwy 6. The section of 6 from Wiarton to Tobermory was closed by 11:00 am on Friday and my plans to leave for the the cottage after work were reluctantly scrapped in exchange for an uneventful weekend at home. Two amigos that would normally accompany me on a photo outing were down, each with their own afflictions, so I decided to stay very close to home. Actually I barely went out, except for clearing the accumulating snow, occasional walking of the dog and dinner at a new restaurant with Lynn Saturday night. I spent most of my time reading or working on photo projects in process.

One such photo project was experimenting in Photoshop with watercolour effects on some of my images from Italy. Recent discussions with the aforementioned amigos about sketching, pen and ink and watercolours had stirred my interest in creating both conventional and digital versions of select images. This weekend was the time to work digitally.

There is a seemingly unlimited amount if material online for just about anything and watercolour effects in Photoshop are no different. The challenge like everything else on the interwebs is sorting through the crap to get to the useful stuff. I selected a few links and investigated, eventually ending up using one from a UK photographer. His approach was not complicated and after some trial and error, I was able to produce something decent. I'm not sure that I'm completely done with the work on this image yet. It still needs a few tweaks and perhaps a complete re-do from scratch to see if how much I can refine the end result.

morning canal

All in all, it was a great learning exercise and it distracted me from the frustration of not being able to get up north.

DJE