The other day I was in an art gallery, and I realized that something artists will do to help compose an image is to control the amount of detail they add to different parts of an image. This picture is a great example of reducing detail in an image. I whited out the mountain on the left because I thought the effect of a white sunburst produced a better composition. I used a bilateral filter on the foreground to destroy detail while keeping preserving the contours of the branches.
Some might say I overdid things with this picture, but if I did, I sure had a lot of fun doing it. To me photography is not just about capturing a scene, it’s about creating art.
The square format of this picture really helps position the snow mound and the flower along intersections on the rule of thirds. I like the way a spring flower is contrasted with a winter snow mound.
I love the way the picture draws your eyes to the magnificent clouds on the top. This is from the vibrant colors and brighter on the top vs the duller colors and values on the bottom. The blue and orange colors create a nice color theme.
When you take a picture think of how it will look when your done editing. Originally the clouds in this picture were a muddled blue-gray, and the mountains and houses were dark and difficult to make out.
I took this picture on a snowy spring day along with this pic. I like the way the snow matches the tulip in the way the shadows both have a lot of green in them.
So one day I read that the shape of your aperture determines the shape of your bokeh, so I set out to explore this further. I cut out a bunch of cardboard circles, cut different shapes into these circles, and stuck these circles in my lens. Sure enough, the bokeh matched the shape of the hole, however, what I found to be interesting was to play around with a pin-hole cut into the cardboard, mimicking the effect of a pin-hole camera. It must also be noted that because I’m not the best at cutting out circles there was some light leaking in from the edges of the cardboard. This is one of the pictures I took with this “pin-hole” camera.
As I often do, I messed with the foreground-background relationship. I applied a focus blur to the background, and brightened it up.
I would like to talk about the way this picture was sharpened. It’s quite interesting. When blurring the image, instead of obtaining the high frequencies by applying a gaussian blur, I used a bilateral filter.
final version
