An impressionistic view of day lillies

[DanK]

Decided to try something different, following up on an idea I got in a workshop by Charles Needle. C&C welcome.

For anyone interested in how I did this: the original shot was a reflection of the wall and flowers in a shallow pool. I inverted it to get the flowers pointed up. The texture, apart from movement of the water, is from overlaying a shot of a slab of granite, blended with linear light and fairly low opacity.

[HMW12]

The advantages of viewing on an iPad -I can turn it upside down to see what yor mean. I would never have known this was a inverted reflection if you had not mentioned it. I find the reflection of what I assume to be a tree on the right a bit distracting. I kept focusing on it trying to figure out why it looked abit odd, like it was growing into a backdrop. Otherwise I really like this. Especially the contrast of the bright flowers against the darker blues and greens of the background. Very creative. What was the subject of the workshop?

[warrenjwalker]

DanK,

This was very cool! Photographing the reflection and then inverting it was a very creative idea. I could imagine how the textures from the water could give a very impressionistic appeal. And then overlaying a shot of a slab of granite was a very cool way to add texture. In my oppinion, the beauty of this image was actually in the method that you used to capture it.

- Jacob

[DanK]

Thanks for the comments. The workshop was primarily about creative macro work--e.g., photographing the reflection of a flower on textured, colored glass rather than straight on--but we did a few hours of field work as well. Charles recommended that when you see an interesting texture in the field, take a shot and store it for possible use as a background. I'll post below one of my attempts from the workshop. The background in this case is pebbles on a walkway.

Re the birch on the right: I wanted it there for several compositional reasons, but it's all a matter of taste.

Here's the workshop photo. Not so good, but it illustrates the technique.