Many people believe the Nessie, Loch Ness Monster is an evolved Plesiosaur. These dinosaurs were carnivorous aquatic reptiles with long necks and the body in the shape of a turtle without a shell. These dinosaurs were first found in England, so it is possible that one or more survived through the ages; however, the plesiosaur’s neck wasn’t designed to bend upward to the degree that they could left their heads above the water as most Nessie pictures show. Even if they could, gravity would have tipped their body forward which would keep most of their neck in the water. It is possible for their head to reach the surface, but not in the typical “Nessie pose”. Nessie has also been thought to be some sort of long necked seal, an eel, an unknown amphibian species, or some sort of invertebrate. It could also be a plesiosaur that has evolved from their fossilized ancestors.

Loch Ness is the largest body of fresh water in Britain. It’s 754 feet deep, 22.5 miles long, and 1-1.5 miles wide. It is said that the loch never freezes, which could account for how the dinosaur survived through the ages. Below 100 feet, the temperature of the water never varies from 44 degrees Fahrenheit due to a thermocline. There is a large cavern system deep in the lake where Nessie is thought to hide.

The Loch Ness Monster has been a popular myth since at least 1933, but there have been reported sitings since as early as 565 by Saint Columbia, who wrote that a beast rose from the loch and attacked a man swimming out to retrieve a boat.

Over the past 4 years, people have debated the monster’s existence on a picture I took of a statue at Eccles Dinosaur part of a Plesiosaur on my photo gallery at The Lens Flare. On this page, I ask the question, could this dinosaur be the ancestor of the Loch Ness Monster? People have misinterpreted my question as “Is this the real Nessie?” and hundreds of people have commented.

The picture recently reached 100,000 views and is the first image on The Lens Flare to do so largely due to the fact that it often shows up on the first page of Google’s image search for phrases like “Loch Ness Monster” and other variations, and the number of visits to this picture per week has dramatically increased since the show “The Water Horse” hit the big screen putting Nessie back in the spotlight. I invite you to take part in the conversation of Nessie on my picture The Loch Ness Monster’s Great Great Granddad.

One of the most exciting things about digital photography is not the camera itself, but what you can do with the photo after the fact using various software programs such as Photoshop.

A fun thing to do is to take multiple images and merge them together forming a composite image. A person might add a sky, mountain, or flower to an interesting sky or they might add animals such as deer or birds where there weren’t any previously. Sometimes different landscape elements are added such as a nice looking tree or rock outcropping, and sometimes it’s as simple as swapping out a boring sky for one that’s much more exciting.

It’s easy to add elements to a picture, but much harder to make them look right when all of the layers are put together. Little pieces of grass and other artifacts are common and time consuming to remove. Photoshop’s Extract tool is a good place to start. It will help you remove an object from one image so that you can copy it into another. It does a decent job of getting the edges right, but you’ll need to fine tune it some. What I do is duplicate the layer, then extract the object out of the duplicate. I convert this new object to gray scale and copy it to a layer mask. A layer mask is a gray scale layer that allows portions of the layer below it to be shown. The different gray values translate to opacity values. By converting the extracted layer to gray scale, I have a pretty good representation of the object that needs to be seen. I then paint on white and/or black to the edges of the layer mask to fix any edge problems in the original extracted layer. Once I have my perfectly extracted object, I can include that layer and its mask into the composite image and position it accordingly. Sometimes there are a few pixels that seem out of place once the layers have been combined, so I’ll fix those individually by zooming in and then I use the clone stamp tool to edit out the problems.

Extracting objects is really an art form all to itself. To do this so, you’ll need to know how to use the extract tool in Photoshop and how layer masks work, which I’m sure there are countless tutorials on the Internet that show you exactly how to use both. If you don’t have Photoshop, check to see if your photo editing software supports these things. If not, you can buy Photoshop Elements for about $99.

Doug Hough from my photo gallery, The Lens Flare, has a lot of really great composites, and the thumbnail in this article was created by Donwrob.

Nature photography is one of my favorite hobbies because I love being out in the wilderness capturing unique slices in time that may never be seen exactly that same way again.  For a hundred dollars, a person can buy a digital point and shoot camera and get started in this great hobby, but the price tag can get steep really fast. A person can be tempted into buying expensive DSLR cameras and a full array of lenses.  Fortunately, there are ways to shoot better nature photographs (and photos in general), that don’t cost an extra penny except in time experimenting and practicing various techniques. I’ve written an article on several tips to improve your nature photography without buying new equipment. It’s worth reading for anybody contemplating the art and hobby of shooting photographs of the wild.

Of course, at some point, a person may decide that it’s worth the expense to upgrade their camera equipment to shoot professional grade photos.  When that time comes, my nature photography blog has tips and other helpful information on camera equipment and other topics related to nature photography.

I’m pleased to announce that the 3rd revision of The Lens Flare is now live. The Lens Flare is a large friendly community of artists and photographers who use the site to upload images, share ideas, and learn from each other. It’s located at http://www.thelensflare.com

To quickly recap the new features, they include:

• More Images: Up to 500 images on the basic free account, 1000 images for silver, and unlimited for the gold account.
• Less expensive to upgrade your account.
• Multiple Image Sizes: 150px thumbnail, 500px standard image, 900px large image, and 2 250px detail images.
• Dashboard - to quickly get to important links.
• Albums - to organize your pictures however you want.
• Videos - updated art and photography videos from YouTube.
• Camera Reviews - to help you decide on which camera to purchase.
• Search - the search page has been improved.
• Image Categories - categories are formed automatically based on the pictures on the site.
• Member Profile - customize your homepage with the profile fields.
• Stat Counter - view traffic to your pages, where in the world they come from, etc by integrating your statcounter.com account with your pages on The Lens Flare. To do this, add your stat counter codes on your profile page.
• Image Management - easier management of your images, with stats showing traffic trends over the last 7 and 30 days to your pictures.
• Less Spam - spam registrations and crude comments will be far fewer with the addition of several features to hinder automated programs from submitting information to the site.
• New Look and Feel - the site’s look and feel has been completely redone to promote a more professional appearance.

Thank you and I look forward to seeing you on the website.

–
http://www.thelensflare.com - Art and Photography Community Gallery

A few weeks ago, we stayed with my wife’s sister in a small town in eastern Idaho called Victor near the  Grand Tetons.  While we were there, we visited the Upper and Lower Mesa Falls and Cave Falls inside Yellowstone National Park.   We were there during the middle of the day, which is probably the worst time to shoot a waterfall because the amount of light needs to be really small to keep the shutter open long enough to capture the motion of the water. 

I used a special filter called an ND2 (neutral density) filter.  This is like putting a pair of sunglasses on your camera, and set up the camera so that it would limit the amount of light getting inside by using the smallest aperture the lens would allow and setting the ISO to the lowest number the camera will go.  For my Nikon D50 and 28-80mm lens, the smallest aperture is f/32 and the ISO is 200.  I also used a tripod to make sure the camera didn’t shake while the shutter was open.

One thing I learned is that the white water tricks the camera into thinking it’s getting overexposed even though it’s not, so I could have increased the shutter time even further.  I’d also like to try shooting these (or other falls) either at dawn or dusk, or during a dark cloudy day because the camera’s shutter could be open far longer than it was.

At any rate, I believe these pictures turned out reasonably well: (click on the pictures for larger versions):
 

Even though I plan to continue to shoot waterfalls wherever and whenever I can, this fulfills one of my goals to take a slow motion picture of a huge waterfall.

I really enjoy art and photography, and the pictures at the top of the page represent a few that I’m most proud of.  The two eagles and the sword picture were rendered in Bryce, and the rest are photographs that I’ve taken in Utah.  The lightning bolt was taken out my front door, the sunset is of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, and the Spatterdock flower was taken in the Uintas in the northeastern part of Utah. 

You can view larger versions of these pictures and others at The Lens Flare, my photo gallery.