Weekly Photo Challenge: Carefree

I’m not a very good gardener.  So in our garden we keep it simple.  I keep my eye out for native plants that don’t need a lot of care.  This year we tried two patches of wildflowers in our garden.  One worked really well and the other is struggling.  I think the patch that is struggling just doesn’t get enough sun. The patch that is doing well has produced some beautiful coneflowers:

ISO 200 50mm 0ev f/3.2 1/40

In order to get this photo I used my tripod.  These flowers are only somewhat protected by the house, so any breeze will blur the photo.  I could have overcome this by shooting at a higher ISO and shutter speed, but in this case the color is better if the ISO and shutter speed are low.  It is a subtle difference, but in this case it mattered to me.  I settled on an f-stop of 3.2.  That left enough in focus and blurred out enough of the background.  So, I was happy with this version of the photo, but I did want to create something a bit different:

ISO 200 50mm 0ev f/3.2 1/40

The theme of this week’s photo challenge by WordPress is carefree. So, I wanted to create a slightly dreamier looking version of my original photo.  I used Photoshop to do my editing.  I have applied an oil paint filter to the photo.  Then I used the high pass filter with soft light.  The result you see above is more mellow than the original photo.  Ironic isn’t it, that I had to do more work to look carefree?

Cheers!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Escape

I went biking this past weekend and was thinking about this week’s photo challenge, escape.  I guess going biking was a way of escaping the housework.  Maybe this sounds crazy, but I think both being outside and cleaning the house are necessary things that I don’t want to escape.  Then I biked past this flower that had definitely escaped:

ISO 100 50mm 0ev f/5.6 1/640

Escaped ideal growing spots anyway.  There is almost nowhere for this plant to spread.  It is a small beauty growing in an ugly space.  In case you are wondering, this plant is Squaw-weed, it is a native plant of Missouri and will grow quite well in your garden in you live this area.  I have some in my garden and it is a great spreader.

As for this particular photo, I was shooting pretty much in the middle of the day on a hazy day, so not great conditions.  I bracketed the exposure because I wanted to so an HDR image to get more detail.  I use Photomatix for my HDR images.  When it came to editing though, it turned out that I didn’t like the high detail version that came out.  I decided I liked a softer look instead.  So, while my HDR image still has detail in terms of the color, I decided against a super-sharp image, an escape from my usual method of editing.

Cheers!