I’ll admit right up front that when I saw that “Cover Art” was the theme for this week’s photo challenge, I had no idea what I was going to do. Then I thought about what I have been shooting lately. A quick look through my files, and you would see that nature images is what I have been focusing on. Then I was looking at this image that I processed a week or so ago:
ISO 160 200mm 0ev f/3.5 1/800
And there is my cover art for an article on the plight of bees. I was thinking in terms of a series of images. The one above looks nice and cheery and the truth is that beehives aren’t thriving lately. I wanted to make the image that conveys that peril. The above image was shot in a local cemetery and I had used an f-stop of 3.5 to blur out the background. I also tweaked the exposure a bit and sharpened it in Photoshop.
My first thought was to convert it to a infrared image, I thought that would create a surreal, something is a bit off kind of feel. I did that by creating a black and white layer in Photoshop and then using the infrared setting. I didn’t like the outcome, but I did like the black and white version, which was the first step in creating this image:
ISO 160 200mm 0ev f/3.5 1/800
While I liked the tone of the image, I felt that it was too sharp and that blurring would help create a sense of the bees disappearing. So this image has a field blur filter applied to it.
I liked it, but was curious to see what a similar filter setting would look like in color. So, I created another version:
ISO 160 200mm 0ev f/3.5 1/800
Now I’m not sure which version I like best. Which version most suggests to you that something has gone wrong for the bee population? Feel free to let me know in the comments section!
Cheers!
Photography Journal Blog 