Dancing in the wind I must admit, I struggled to find inspiration this week, a couple of ideas I had didn't work well, so I went into the garden and thought this English Laurel might be a good subject. I took several images with a Lee 10 stop filter on to capture any movement from the breeze in the flower heads with a 13 second shutter speed then took another image without the filter to freeze any movement using 1/80 shutter speed. I then developed the images in lightroom and selected two to take into Photoshop as layers, and blended them until I got an image that looked like what I was hoping for. I didn't quite get what I wanted, but this was as close to achieving my aims as I could get.
“ A Bird in the Hand is worth two in the bush ” This is Charlie our 10 year old Cockatiel, he was hand raised, and is a very friendly little bird although sometimes a little destructive. The image is a composite as I could only capture an image of Charlie sitting where he likes to come and visit without having a messy background, so I used one of my old images which I blurred to help with depth, I also added some soft shadow behind Charlie to help blend him into the background a little. Gently blowing on Charlie is the best way to get him to raise his wings, but he does tend to wriggle about quite a lot when I do that, so I had to take a lot of images before getting one that was clear enough. I used a corded remote trigger and had the camera set up for about an hour before getting the shot.
“ Relax ” Well this turned out to be one of those weeks where I have tried something completely new to me, I made a star shape out of an old business card and the lights were from an ornamental tree. I tried a few things as the main subject, but then spotted this Relax sign and thought I could probably do something a bit creative with this that would fit the bokeh background. lighting was quite tricky as I didn't want to light anything beyond the bokeh lights and also having a lot of the lens covered made it tricky to get enough exposure on the subject. I ended up using a torch to light the sign, and with some playing around, eventually got the exposure about right. I edited the image in Lightroom first, then photoshop to remove the stand the wooden puppet stands on.
