Month: March 2019

Fading Away

by Ken Mickel, posted in Flowers

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These lovely Daisies were photographed in my backyard one morning with side lighting. The flower was in a pot, which I placed in a partially shaded area. The background was in direct sun light, helping me to create a white background. I only wanted just good detail in the pedals in the front, so I opened up the aperture to f5.6

In post, a conversion to black and white was in Lightroom. To make the flowers in the background appear as though they are fading away into the distance, I added a white vignette plus used the adjustment brush to increase the exposure in some areas just a little bit.

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Hanging Above The Water

by Ken Mickel, posted in Artistry, Waterscapes

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A Monarch Butterfly trying to keep dry, well not really, just a little bit of Photoshop to make it look that way. This butterfly was actually in a tree which I photographed a few years ago. Recently, wanting to get creative with this old image, I used a Photoshop Plug-in called Flood 2 to introduce the water into the image. Back in Photoshop, with some cloning and masking, I covered the horizon of the water with the background, (which was a cloudy sky and part tree), to make the water look like as if it is fading away into the mist.

 

Tempe Town Lake

by Ken Mickel, posted in Landscapes, Waterscapes

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A sunset photo of the Mill Avenue Bridge over Tempe Town Lake in Tempe, Arizona. This is a man made lake created by damming the Salt River. To the left of the bridge is Tempe, Arizona. Then just to the right is the City of Phoenix.

I wanted to create a long exposure image to both smooth out the water on the lake and capture some movement of the clouds. Due to slow moving clouds, I had to use an 83 second exposure to capture the movement I wanted.

For me, I really liked all the contrasts this image displays. First, there is the contrast of the light and shadows. Then the clouds look like an explosion of energy to contrast with the smoothness of the water. The capture of motion also contrasts nicely with the solid standing bridge.

You may view a larges size version of this image on Flickr