Category: Advanced Techniques (Page 1 of 2)

“Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change.”

Michael Michalko

In my last post, I ruminated on how my history of shooting photographs in which I was limited by striving to eliminate “hand of man” may have hampered my creativity.  I was going to go back over my images and see what I could find that did have hand of man that I would be excited to show you. These images are primarily photographs of cityscapes, and can be seen in my flickr album of Chicago.  I have also enjoyed photographing architectural interiors, such as the Milwaukee Art Museum ( The Calatrava ), the Chicago Cultural Center, and a few churches, namely the Church of the Transfiguration, St.Peter and Paul Church in Naperville, IL, and St. Volodymyr and Olha Church in Chicago, IL.

Another area of creativity, involving photography and some proficiency in using editing software such as Adobe Photoshop, is the creation of composites.  I had been noticing online several photos of the Milky Way, with some artificially lit geological formations in the earth portion of the photo. I wanted to see bigger arches, more well-lit, and a centering of the Milky Way through the arch.  I realized this could be achieved by a composite of a Milky Way photo and an arch photo. The “Milky Way Arch” was born!

My thanks go to the photographers Tom Gainor and David Becker for donating their images to unsplash.com.

And deep thanks to my imagination for helping me change the way I look at things! 🙂

Daisy Daisy Give Me Your Answer Do

This image is titled after a song written in 1892, often sung to me when I was a child by my mother and grandmother:

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do.
I’m half crazy all for the love of you.
It won’t be a stylish marriage.
I can’t afford a carriage.
But you’ll look sweet upon the seat
Of a bicycle built for two.

For this image, I wanted to experiment with the blur effect in Photoshop.  I wanted it to look like there were streaks of energy or light shooting out radially from the prominent daisy about a third of the way in from the left.

Daisy Layers

The bottom layer is the original image.

Above that is a Blur Layer where I have applied a radial blur smart filter.  This layer has a mask that is painted black in areas where I want the shape of a daisy to not be blurred.

The top layer is a curves layer to adjust tones to make the “important” daisies look brighter than their surrounding foliage.