[Puma Cat]

Originally Posted by clpetersen

Hey Stephen - great photos.(it is Chris BTW, not Craig; no big deal).

Oh, I'm sorry. Thank you for letting me know, Chris.

Originally Posted by clpetersen

Was the blurred water w/o tripod? That is really impressive either way. Photos like that separated the men from the boys in old-school photography.

The photo of the home dominated by the garage is very similar to our first CA home (no worries, different house number) and we were required to have clay roofs in those days (1990's) - metal wasn't where it is today.

Last question: what is sky replacement? a more dramatic sky?

The water in the creek was flowing and the photo was taken without a tripod. If you put the camera in Live mode, one of the processing results it will produce is a "long exposure". So, it takes multiple frames and then blends them to produce the motion blur.

Sky replacement is where another image of a sky is placed into the "base" photo layer as another layer, then blended and matched for exposure (Photoshop supports working with many layers, which you can use to add "content" as another layer, or as adjustments as "adjustment layers"). As you may well know, we don't get much in the way of clouds in California, so we often do a sky replacement (from a library of sky stock photos) to add some interest to the photograph. You can also flip the orientation of the SR so that the direction of where the light is coming from is correct, geographically-speaking (e.g. from the West at sunset).

Cheers, Chris.