Category Archives: Special Effects

Playing With Fall Colors

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Washington Arboretum, Seattle

I constantly look over my previous images to review how I have achieved a certain look so I can improve on it.  Today I was reviewing my images for examples of pulling a viewer into the frame through the illusion of depth.  Well, this image has nothing to do with that, but it still caught my eye.

The image is a double exposure of a couple of maples in their fall glory.  They had strong dark branches with the leaves receiving side lighting.  I was in a light playful mood, so I tried a double exposure.  I like the way it came out.

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How Van Gogh Would Paint a Boat

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Boat Graveyard & Repair Facility – Charleston, Oregon

I spent a couple of hours exploring an old boat graveyard in Charleston, Oregon,  I was fascinated with all the chipped paint on the old boats from a by-gone era.  They had seen a much better time.  I can just imagine the stories these old boats could tell.  I picked an image at random and played with it in Topaz Impression.  I applied a Van Gogh painting style as an overlay.  Today I needed a break from reality

 

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Change of Pace

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Roseate Spoonbill

I needed a little change of pace and started reviewing some photographs from an earlier wildlife photography trip.  In my review, I found this “fellow” just waiting to be processed and displayed.

Lesson Learned:  It pays to go back and review old images from time to time.

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Face in the Mud

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Face Abstract – Valley of Fire, Yellowstone National Park

Photography has taught me to keep my eyes open and be ready to see the unusual.  Walking along a path in Yellowstone’s Valley of Fire, I gazed down into a bubbling hot spring and saw this face looking up at me.  I stopped worked the scene and captured an image.  On my computer, I softened the image and added a little impressionistic touch.  Can you see the face?

Photography, vision, and imagination go hand in hand.

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Sometimes I Just Need to Play

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Bandon Beach

I just got a new B&W conversion SW plug-in (Macphun Tonality).  I picked out some photos of the beach near Bandon, Oregon to work on.  I played around to explore some of the secondary features.  After converting to B&W I added a “misty/dreamy” look.  I then added a paper texture and a vignette.  Sometimes I just need to play to get my creative juices flowing.

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Think Creative

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Onomea Falls Water Color

I recently visited the Hawaiian Botanical Gardens, near Hilo, Hawaii.  My mission was to photograph creatively.  I did not focus on the overall beauty of the environment around me.  My focus was on separate scenes, small vignettes, and macro detail while using creative photographic techniques.

For this image, I took multiple exposures covering the range from the bright water and sky to the dark shadows.  When I brought them together into an HDR, all the tonalities were captured. However, I lost the feeling of the dense tropical rainforest setting.  So I decided to play a little with Topaz’s new ‘Studio” software.  I used the watercolor effect to create this image.

I haven’t given up on the natural presentation of this image yet.  It will require a lot of luminance masking with layers to get the natural image that I saw in my mind.  I will do this at a future time when I am in a very patient mood.

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See and Play

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Sagebrush Swirl

As I look at things, an urge to play sometimes comes over me.  I couldn’t resist, the devil made me do it. I simply did a slow shutter speed circular swirl to capture this interesting abstract.  I tend to see these abstracts when I notice an object with at clear center point and things radiation out from the center.  This sagebrush provided an interesting opportunity.  The following is the sagebrush from a normal perspective.

Sagebrush – Normal Perspective

I enjoy play!

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Experimenting

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Sagebrush – Straight Out of Camera

This is an experiment to try to create an image that was in my mind when I shot this photo.  The above image is the base image I captured.  The sagebrush seems to blend into the background. I lost the 3D feeling that I had when I saw this bush.  I first tried to add structure to the bush and delete structure from the background.  That did not achieve what I wanted.  I then tried black and white.  That merged the brush with the background even more.  I then tried to blur the background.  That looked to “fakey” to me.  I then blended the blurred B&W to the color image to come with the image below.

Sagebrush – Processed

This came the closest to what I saw  in my mind.

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