Thanks everyone, I know I will always get a good well balanced critique from you guys (except for the herbal tea drinkers of course
) - the missus likes it BTW and wants me to print it, but don't know if I will
Dave, I think you need to check your lens. Is it auto-focusing properly? If you're Claude Monet you can get away with slap-dash fuzzyness, but with a camera, uh uh. The color's nice, but. . .
I don't use auto-focus Russ, or auto anything for that matter, just setup through LV and the detail was sharply focussed, but the wind on that day was very strong indeed. So I thought, as I can't get a sharp shot without going silly with the ISO and as I wanted to keep the DoF, I would try doing the opposite and try a 1/4 second exposure. Let the flowers paint them selves onto the sensor kind of thing.
There are a number of well-known photographers who've made very good livings using techniques such as this.
That would be nice, as it is a really easy technique to do - I will be rich!!!
I very much like the look, and I suspect that it does nicely capture some impression of the summer wildflowers.
However, it's much more a texture than a picture. There's no hierarchy of elements, no composition to speak of at all, mainly on account of there being no actual objects of masses to arrange. I think you can do much better than this, without losing the impressionistic flavor.
Yes Andrew, I do intend to go back for yet another go at these flowers on a much less windy day - leave it with me.
This image makes me smile. As a consumer of beautiful things, I love it. As a photographer, I am trying to figure out what it is? photo, painting, motion blur....etc....
...but it doesn't matter. It made me smile and that is enough.
Thank you, that is exactly the response I think I was hoping for
I like the shapelessness of the image -- I am curious as to how you achieved it.
OK, in the spirit of sharing, it is an idea I have been tinkering with for a while in various forms. But for this particular instance, if you want to have a go yourself, then select your subject (for this I chose colourful wildflowers obviously), I then setup the shot with a long(ish) lens, I used a 70/200 with a 1.4x converter. Using the usual 1/3 in hyperfocal distancing, I then stopped right down (f/45 I think it was for this shot) or you can use an ND filter or whatever you need until you get an exposure of between 1/8 to 1/4 second, then wait for the wind to blow a little. Fire off around 10 shots by just keeping your finger pressed on the remote release until the buffer fills up.
Now highlight all the ten images in Bridge and select to load them into Photoshop layers - they will now load straight into PS without going through the ACR edit screen and also be stacked into a single file in PS. Highlight all the layers again and select a blend mode, for this image I think I used 'lighten' but just experiment until you get a blending effect you like for your start image - you will need a fast machine with lots of RAM to do this if your RAWs are large. Then having got what you want on screen, flatten the file and tweak to your hearts desire.
One last tip, you still need to make the image from a good composition to begin with, in fact possibly more so, as there will not be anything other than colour and a sensation of the detail behind it appearing in the final shot, so take a fast single shot first to make sure you would be happy with it as a stand alone shot/composition, then set up as mentioned above and fire away for the Monet effect
Dave