Waltzing

Today has been one of those dark grey wet days we get in January, particularly in the South West, with lots of low cloud.  It makes taking pictures outside difficult and unattractive.  There's not enough low cloud for a nice misty shot, and short of taking shots of wellington boots and umbrellas, or puddles with rain drops, your options are limited.  So It was an indoor shot for me!

Cathy is the piano player in our house.  I've been meaning to have a go, and every now and again I start, but you do need to practice regularly and I just haven't managed to fund the time to date.  Perhaps when I retire I will give it a go.  

Having a piano in the house has always been a delight.  After dinner Cathy sits down most days to tinkle the ivories for half an hour or so (although I hasten to add these are plastics not real ivory).  The sound of her playing somehow makes the house our home.  If I ever got stuck on that desert island that they have on Radio 4 in the UK, I think I would miss that a lot.  There are certain bits of music (a Chopin Nocturne in particular) that Cathy plays quite a bit and they will forever be associated with her in my mind, and so would definitely have to feature in my Desert Island Discs selection.

I've been meaning to have another go at focus merging in Affinity Photo and this shot is the result of my experiments.  I've used 12 individual shots at different focal lengths, and the used the focus merge feature in Affinity.  The mono conversion has been done using the NIK silver effex plugin, which is free from Google of course.  I've then applied a split tone blue/brown treatment to achieve the dark chocolate tones, which I rather like in mono.

Interestingly this doesn't look that sharp in Blipfoto's standard resolution, you have to look in large to see that it is quite sharp.