©Rena Katinas

So, I’m a little behind on my Photo Challenges. With the subject being sky, I shouldn’t be, as I’m a big fan of cloud watching and star gazing. Anyhoo, I shot this the day after the Great Storm of June 2011, from my back porch.

©Rena Katinas

You’re thinking, lightning is not refreshing. On a hot Chicago summer night, like tonight, it was very refreshing indeed. Too bad it all started before I could find my tripod, holding the camera still for 30 a second exposure is impossible. In the end I decided better tired arms and blurry treetops than no shot! Also that strange cloud on the lower right, is a funnel cloud!

Decided to throw a couple more in, after I realized I had captured a funnel cloud in my shots, sorry for the blurriness!

©Rena Katinas

©Rena Katinas

©Rena Katinas

©Rena Katinas

I’m glad there is no shortage of “worn” in my neighborhood! Pictured above is a small portion of my neighbor’s garage door. Unfortunately I shot this about a half an hour before sunset, which would’ve been great if it were facing west (it faces east.) The next sunny morning that comes along, I’ll be back.

German Baptist Deaconess Home and Hospital Society (formerly) ©Rena Katinas

I walk past what was once the Baptist Girls Home pictured above, most evenings. The stair entrance is painted mint green and the combination of it with fluorescent light gives it this sickly green glow that I wanted to document with a photograph in case someone had a sudden case of good sense and changed the color/lighting combination.

Once I brought the image into Lightroom 3 for development, I realized I had two different light sources in the shot and each had a different white balance setting. You can see in the set of photos below, that neither white balance in the left and middle image works on a whole. Even though I like the green in the Tungsten (left) version, it’s not a true color representation of the subject. The fluorescent version (middle) is right on the money as far as the stairwell and wood door are concerned, but it throws the color of everything else completely out of wack. Normally I would go to the Hue/Saturation/Luminance panel in Lightroom, to deal with off color, but I wanted to work on the wood door without affecting the brick’s color. A HSL panel within the Adjustment Brush would be a really nice thing right about now! There isn’t one, so the next best thing is Layer Masks in Photoshop.

White Balance from left to right: tungsten, fluorescent, and tungsten/fluorescent combined

I put the Tungsten version on the topmost layer, including a layer mask  and the Fluorescent version below. After I removed most of the door and stairwell in the layer mask, I realized that I had forgotten the third light source, the street light behind me and the bottom step which had a mix of all three light sources. Using a brush set at 10% opacity, I was able to decide the light source percentages for each plane of the lower half of the steps and the sidewalk, by selectively painting back into, or removing from the mask layer of the channels palette.

Mask in channels palette

Once I put the almost final image in this post, I noticed three blue shadows, that must have something to do with the change in color space from Photoshop to the browser window, so I’ll have to figure out what’s going on there. Bottom line, it would be nice if there were a way to have multiple white balances along with Hue/Saturation/Luminosity, using the Adjustment Brush in Lightroom, but thank goodness for my old friend, Photoshop’s layer mask feature until then!

©Rena Katinas

I really wasn’t sure what I was going to do for this week’s Photo Challenge. Our city rests on an inland sea, a beautiful one, but a picture of Lake Michigan as a whole is just a bit too literal for me. I considered doing some sort of something or other with glasses of water, but my family seems to be hoarding all the water glasses in their bedroom. I thought I was going to have to opt out of this week’s challenge. Wouldn’t you know it, today turned out to be one of those wonderful rainy spring days, the kind that turn the sky so dark, you have to turn the lights on at noon. Really dark stormy days are so rare, and I love them. Pictured above is a close-up of water droplets on my window screen, or Lake Michigan in very tiny bits.

©Rena Katinas

This week I have not one but two photos, taken at 18th and Wentworth, down by the railroad tracks. These thistles or weeds are on their own, there isn’t much nature to be found in the immediate area. The second image is just me having a little fun in Photoshop!

©Rena Katinas

I had fully planned on posting a list of things to do before the end of the world (who knew?!) which I only found out about on Thursday. I figured I could blog and do a little spring cleaning on the traffic areas of the carpeting at the same time and set up my SpotBot for carpet ass kickin’. I pressed the set in stain button and the SpotBastard doesn’t work, all the lights light up and it beeps incessantly. Perhaps it knows it’s the end of the world and just doesn’t care any more. So instead of preparing an Apocalypse list to post, I spent all yesterday evening googling and testing, making a giant flood-mess in the bathroom, then an hour on the phone with the Bissell customer “support” zombies, then more fiddling and generally getting nowhere fast.

Now I’m facing the end of the world with dirty traffic areas, plus I didn’t get to eat a lobster with lots of butter, or party in the streets like it’s the end of the world. Well I guess there’s always the day after the end of the world, and up until the final end of the world on October 21. I’m not exactly sure, because I couldn’t be bothered to read the entire end of the world summary. I think that’s the period of time when we are supposed to sit out on lawn chairs while holding umbrellas and just watch stuff fall apart until October.

It’s not clear what time the apocalypse is scheduled for today, so far the neighborhood isn’t a flaming pile of rubble. I’ve checked out my windows, hoping to see the likes of Cheney, Bush, Newt, Rush (Limbaugh, not the band) and those two genital warts, Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin engulfed in flames, floating up to the outer atmosphere until they disappear. So far nothing, but it is a foggy day today, here in Chicago.

Well I guess there’s always the next end of the world, or the one after that. Until then I’ve prepared myself with a big beatin’ stick, a large capacity stock pot, my “Judgement Day 2011 OR 2012″ T-shirt, and pina colada fixings. I’ll be gathering apocalyptic recipes for the many things that might rain down upon us: the sky, locusts, frogs, Tea Baggers, (er, Tea Party members) even the reanimated corpse of Ronald Reagan.

Here’s hoping you all have a warm and festive apocalypse today and many more to follow!

©Rena Katinas

Taken at the Chicago Botanical Garden in the Rose Garden.

©Rena Katinas

Wildlife in Chicago isn’t abundant, mostly rats and stray cats in my neighborhood. I found this guy or gal chilling at the boat yards along the Chicago River, on the south side. It’s some kind of insect, I know that much. Maybe it’s a cicada, or a grasshopper, not sure how to tag this… “mystery bug”? If there are any bug-people out there, (bug enthusiasts or people who believe they have been genetically altered with bug DNA – I’m not picky) if you know what this is, let me know!

scribble©2011 Rena Katinas

My little painting area is in total disarray right now. I became so frustrated with my attempt to rearrange for not only my right handedness but for my easel to face, god forbid, light, that I just left everything in a state of mid-rearrange. It’s now becoming my white whale and I’ve chosen the time-honored tactic of avoidance to deal with it over the last few nights.

What’s the best way to avoid doing things you should be doing? Corel Painter! (Also GarageBand, but I don’t want to confuse things further.) Why spend your late nights figuring out how build a large tabouret that won’t fall over without the aid of wood or tools, when my computer already has a studio filled with art supplies that are organized and easy to find.

I tend to do a lot of doodling and scribbling, after I first open Painter, it’s a good way to warm up and free my mind. So I scribbled away, lost in the zone listening to Panjabi MC, only half paying attention to the marks I was laying out. When I stopped, I realized my jamming to Indian hip hop scribble had turned into some sort of figurative scribble by accident and I was pleased!