HDR and Friends



I have been playing around with HDR and other artistic effects.  Here are some of the results.  This is a lily as I shot it.

 

 

Here it is with HDR painterly and posterizing edges.

 

Here it is with HDR painterly and Ink Outlines.

 

And here it is with HDR and creative monochrome.

Silhouettes

       It was a beautiful afternoon for a bike ride.  We went to Illinois Beach State Park as we often do.  We took a short break and I went down a little hill to the Lake.  When I turned around and looked up I saw our bikes against the ski.  I asked my husband to move next to the bikes with the dog.  I took a few shots to get Sebastian looking in the right direction. 

        I liked how it turned out and I wanted to use it for a new cover shot on Facebook, but the shot was too narrow.  In Photoshot Elements 9 I used the recompose tool, highlighted the center in green to keep it as is and hightlighted the sides in red saying I didn't care if that changed.  I was then able to stretch the photo to become a panoramic.  It worked great and I was able to put this shot as my new cover photo.  (I also had to put it on my husband's page because he liked it too.)

Painting with Light

I have seen pictures where photographers used flashlights to paint with light.  I had an idea of using the light of fireworks to paint with light.  I focused manually at infinity.  I used manual exposure,  ISO 100, f8 and 10-15 second exposures to capture several bursts.    I put my camera on a tripod and moved my camera from one side to the other and up and down and around on my ball head in smooth movements to create the effect.  Here are some of the results I got.