It's a what?

I was thinking about shooting the Bridgers again tonight...the sky was epic again and that beautiful orange glow was back.

But I didn't. Mostly because I was out doing other things....

So instead, I shot broccoli. Yes, broccoli. With a macro filter of course. Truthfully, I had no idea what I was going to shoot and there just happened to be broccoli near by....so you know.

What I was originally going for was a mock aerial shot. The kind of ones from directly above snowy trees. I really like those, so I wondered if you could reproduce the effect but on a smaller scale. As it turns out, you can. Obviously, there's not going to be trees per say, but the little bits of broccoli looked pretty cool. I shot at f/5.6, so there was some attempt at having depth of field. However, I didn't want too much, as it would ruin the blurred background I was creating.

Once I got it into Lr, things started going crazy. First off, I really didn't like it. Maybe it was because I knew it was just broccoli, but I didn't find it as an interesting photo.

My first attempt at editing was to up the whites, shadows, exposure and clarity. This was all an attempt to get some more pop or drama or something out of it. Sort of worked, but it still just looked like a photo of broccoli to me.

Ps time. Photoshop always fixes things, right? I figured there was some filter or thing I could do that would get me the result I wanted. As I browsed the filters, I saw one for oil painting. I've never used that one before, so I gave it a try. After playing with setting in it for a while to figure out what the did, I got something I thought was pretty neat. It doesn't look like an oil painting...but it doesn't look like broccoli anymore either. Everything has this rich, creamy look. Kind of odd, but I like it.

Back in Lr, clarity went all the way up, as well as whites. Just punched the lights out of those sliders. Then I blurred the edges of the photo to get my special blurry background back that I wanted, and finally I split toned it. Blue and orange as usual. Not much, but enough.

Now it's just some weird abstract....thing. Not really a photo, but something like that?

See you tomorrow!