Our flower gardens are doing incredible this year. I suspect it is due to just exactly the right kind of weather. They aren't even requiring too much maintenance on the watering side of things, which is unusual in St. Louis. I can only think of twice this year I've had to water the flowers, and the lawn.
So, it's a shame I haven't posted more photos since Spring. Lately, with my over-the-top schedule, my main time for garden enjoyment is while I cut the grass! The thing is, it is hard to see the flowers in the dark.
So, yesterday morning, I snapped three quick photos of some Black-Eyed Susans in one of our beds while I was watering the hanging baskets. The last of the three shots turned out nice and sharp (hard to hand-hold flower shots in low light!). So, what did I do? BLURRED it of course! I'm a contrarian photographer. You can click the photo for a larger version - my gift to you for Friday!
For you photo nerds out there that want to try for this same effect, here's all the technical details. All editing was done in GIMP, which is a great (and FREE) Photoshop-like piece of software. Get it.
I took the original, and sharp, photo and made a copy of it in the layer dialog box. Switching to the copied layer, I applied the Gaussian Blur filter with a very high blur setting - 50 in this case. All that is left, is combining this extremely blurred layer with the base photo. Usually, I crank up the brightness of the blurred layer, and merge it using the "multiply" algorithm. Today, though, I experimented a bit and this time merged the blurred layer to the base using the "lighten only" algorithm. You can mess around with each layer individually to get the exact effect that you are looking for. In this case, very little was done, I very slightly lightened the blurred layer to bring out the bright blur areas just a touch. While you can adjust the percentage of the merge for each layer, this one was at 100%.
Then I flattened the image (merging all the layers) and created the jpg you see above. I tweaked the black level just a bit to bring it back to the level of the original photo and it was done!
Image taken with a Nikon D60, 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 kit lens. Other settings were ISO 200, f11, and 1/20 S exposure. The shot was hand-held, with available light only.
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