Through the back door

We have this great azalea bush right outside of my office sliding doors, and there was one dandelion in pretty good shape. So, this morning, I slipped out to grab some shots. It's pretty cool when a great situation is so close.....(I was working in pj's). After trying several lens combinations (200mm macro with extension, 105mm with extension, and 300mm with extension), the 300mm f/4 lens w/ 27mm of extension gave me the completely detail-less background. I was able to stop down to f/8 to get good sharpness in the middle of the subject, yet maintain the completely soft, colorful background. The pink is a solid block of azaleas in open shade and the green is grass in bright sun. The distance of the green to the pink created a quasi color gradient. I thought of adding a texture, but felt that the pristine, clean, bright, and colorful nature of this image was good as it was.

ok......on second thought.....I dropped in AlienSkin's Snap Art impasto filter and painted the effect out of the sharp spores in the center of the subject.......sorry....I couldn't resist

The Cowen Technique - aka Spin-Zoom

This may not be new, but it was new to me when I noticed a private workshop client moving the camera in a unique way and coming up with some very cool abstract interpretations. I noticed that Matt was zooming while twisting the camera. After a few attempts on my own, I liked what was happening and added this technique to my bag of tricks! Quite simply, while hand holding the camera, twist the camera while zooming in or out (it depends). In this blog image, I zoomed out quickly during a very short exposure (1/4sec). It took about 6 exposures to get to where I was in the ballpark of what I was looking for, then shot a few more. What made this a bit challenging was that the subject area was a small patch of very low to the ground flowers and it was bright overcast. Rather than digging out my Singh Ray VariND, I found that rapidly twisting and turning the camera during the short exposure worked well and created more of a sense of motion. This file is raw, meaning that it was saved as a jpeg for posting without any digital optimization. Shot with Nikon D3X and 24-70mm f/2.8 lens.
Thank, Matt, for this very creative technique!