The display of Himalayan blue poppies is an annual event at Longwood Gardens, PA. Having shot these flowers many times, I tried something a little different this year. The new Lensbaby soft focus optic is tremendous, rendering a very different look, especially in how it creates a marbled background, even with busy backgrounds. I used the widest soft focus aperture ring, so I had to choose where to focus for greatest acceptable sharpness. I focused on the orange middle, letting the outer bright tip to go a bit soft. I used Nik's Viveza 2 to saturate the middle and to darken the background.
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11 comments:
Beautiful shot Tony, thanks for sharing how you did it and the processing you used too.
You're certainly welcome, Daniel. Thanks a lot for taking time to comment!
Beautiful. Hoping to get down to Longwood on Sunday myself, see these guys in person.
If you have Photoshop, roll your own virtual soft focus filter and save $89. In Photoshop, open the photo and: (a) new layer via copy (b) apply Gaussian Blur with radius of 20 pixels, (c) set opacity of layer to 49%, (d) create a mask on the layer, (e) use brush to paint sharpness back in where desired. Damn that looks nice!
That's great anonymous, and thanks! Like everything else, it depends on how you like to work. If I did this move a couple hundred times a year, if not more, $89 doesn't seem like a lot, compared to the time saved. Besides, there are many types of soft focus. If you look at the backgrounds on images (that have more background than this one), it's unique and I don't know of any way to easily achieve that. But, I'm really not a photoshop expert.
Tony,
Do you use the lensbaby composer or the control freak?
I use the Composer, John. My favorite optics are the fisheye, soft focus and double glass optic.
As always, Tony, wonderful and inspiring work ... thanks for sharing!
Hey Kerry! Thanks for dropping by!!
Don't be a stranger!
Great picture. I love it.
Thank you very much, Vijay!
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