scottseyephotos

Osprey Diagonal

scottrandall — Thu, 16 May 2013 15:00:13 +0000

While I was out the other morning at the beach, I saw a large bird coming at me and immediately thought it must be one of the local ospreys. It definitely was and it flew directly over me on its way across the inlet. I got this nice shot of him showing his colors as he stared down at me with those yellow eyes. OBTW – this will be my last post for a few days as I make my way up to Yellowstone National Park. I’ll hopefully have some nice photos to share once I arrive there…..

Looks like he might be checking to see whether he could carry me…

Snowy (Egret) Morning

scottrandall — Wed, 15 May 2013 14:00:01 +0000

Yesterday morning I went down to the beach to see what was moving around. One of the reasons I went was that the morning marine layer was supposed to evaporate – didn’t happen. In any case there were many snowy egrets wandering around in the tidal flats – several of which were chasing each other around. I got numerous shots of their high jinx but this is the one that I kind of like…..

Egret tag??

A Mothers Day Post from India

scottrandall — Sun, 12 May 2013 16:58:20 +0000

In honor of the day, I thought I’d post this cute capture of a mother and her young one. This was taken alongside a road near the Satpura National Park in India.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Patterns

scottrandall — Fri, 10 May 2013 15:53:57 +0000

As a photographer who is always interested in nature first, I immediately started thinking about natural patterns which led me to formation flying in geese and this photo taken at the Bosque Del Apache in New Mexico last December.

Nice Pattern – ready for landing

But then I thought about what it would look like with this pattern repeated over and over – so, given the magic of photoshop, I made lots of copies of the birds and put them all in formation – a different “pattern”. That looked pretty good but then I tried it in B&W and I liked that better……I hope you like my final Pattern.

Snow Geese – Yikes!

Another Photoshop experiment…Blue Heron reflection

scottrandall — Fri, 10 May 2013 00:38:27 +0000

I had thought about taking a reflection photo and totally blanking out the background on both the subject and its reflection to see how it would come out. Thats what I did here. If you look closely, I finished it off by applying an oil paint filter on the photo to make the remaining image look like it was a painting – including some texture. Not sure whether I like it or not but it was a fun experiment. What do you think?

Blue Heron on black

Bambi Moment

scottrandall — Wed, 08 May 2013 14:00:18 +0000

We had a few minutes with this Mom and Fawn in the forest in Bandhavgarh National Park in India. Mom was doing a VERY thorough job of grooming her young one – pretty much licking her entire body. This was my favorite photo from that enDEERing interaction (sorry for the bad pun). Pretty cute….and look at the blue eyes!

“oh Mom!”

Phun with Photoshop?

scottrandall — Mon, 06 May 2013 21:35:20 +0000

It was a rainy day here in san diego so I had some time to kill. I stumbled across a YouTube video tutorial on how to use photoshop to make it appear that your images are jumping out of the photo – I thought I’d give it a try. Here’s the result of that tutorial on one of my Bear photos from our Alaska trip in 2011. This is a pretty quick and dirty experiment – I would have taken much more time (this took about 25 minutes) if I’d have wanted to do a “clean version”. Kinda fun – Hope you enjoy….

Frame Jumper

Weekly Photo Challenge: From Above

scottrandall — Sat, 04 May 2013 20:53:04 +0000

While I don’t have any really “vertical” shots that I can think of right now, here’s one “from above” the city of Katmandu, Nepal. It was really nice of the Kite to fly by as I was taking this….

Lite over Katmandu

India – the Motorcycle portraits…

scottrandall — Wed, 01 May 2013 19:43:13 +0000

Here’s another couple of my “from the car” photos from India. The common thread here is that they are both candid shots of motorcycle riders. This first one is of a young lady passenger on the back of a cycle in a small village outside of Agra, India. This is one of those inadvertent shots where the subject (the young woman) was highlighted by someone or something passing in front of my camera on the left side – adding a nice blur to that side of the photo and putting all the attention on the girl.

A lucky shot of an interesting young woman

The next photo is of a young couple on their motorcycle in an intersection in Varanasi at night. We sat in the SAME SPOT in that intersection for at least 10 minutes with absolutely no movement in any direction. This couple were just outside our car window so why not capture them for posterity…..

Portrait by traffic jam

Weekly Photo Challenge: Culture

scottrandall — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 02:23:00 +0000

A pretty easy challenge having recently returned from India and Nepal. I’ll focus on the Indian Hindu culture this week and their relationship with their temples. As you may or may not know the Hindu religion has millions of gods – each signifying some aspect of life. This can be mystifying to a Westerner but we were lucky enough to have a wonderful guide (and friend) to help us understand this rich, complex religion. There are millions of temples throughout the country. While some are very large and ornate, the vast majority of them are small, private shrines which can be found anywhere. They can be as simple as a small altar or even a rock with a place for a candle and other small offerings. Our guide visited numerous altars in the course of his daily activities. He would stop our car at a roadside temple, leave money or other offerings at small temples in the backstreets, or just bow to show his reverence anytime he saw an altar we were passing by in our travels. We were also impressed when, to honor his wife’s birthday, our guide went to the market and bought numerous small packages of food which he then distributed to some of the poorest of the poor in the city. It was obvious that his faith was very important to him and that he “lived it” everyday. In Varanasi, the local guide told us that there were over 70,000 temples in that town alone – having walked the back streets and alleys of that town, we certainly believe it – you basically couldn’t round a corner without seeing another altar. My photo for today is one of the small temples we saw in Varanasi – just big enough for a single person at a time – I was lucky enough to capture a smiling holy man peering out from the shrine.