Photo Corners headlinesarchivemikepasini.com


A   S C R A P B O O K   O F   S O L U T I O N S   F O R   T H E   P H O T O G R A P H E R

Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.

A Burst of Roadside Yellow Share This on LinkedIn   Tweet This   Forward This

28 April 2020

Climbing to the top of Twin Peaks the other day, we couldn't help pausing beside this patch of yellow flowers waving in the wind. It was bright, bold and beautiful to behold, weeds that they are, bursting with color.

Roadside Color. Olympus E-PL1 with 14-42mm II R at 28mm (56mm equivalent) at f10, 1/500 second and ISO 200. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw.

We stopped down to f10 to keep them in focus and lined up our shot, hoping we had something. It's a little hard to see at this size, but we did get something. A bright, bold, beautiful field of flowers.

Not much detail survives in the thumbnail above but detail is not what this image is about. That may seem like heresy but the limited color palette is what this is about. Very dark greens behind a field of bright yellow.

When these flowers turned our head, it wasn't the detail that caught our attention. It was the explosion of color.

But as a photograph, the lack of detail in the small flowers was disturbing. So we tapped into Photoshop's filter gallery to run a Spatter pattern on it. We used a Spray Radius of 13 and a Smoothness setting of 7.

Rendering Comparison. Splatter with a canvas texture did a nice job of abstracting the realistic image.

We also applied a canvas texture to the rendered painting to move a step further away from photorealism.

We liked the effect immediately but we put it aside a while. When we came back to it, we still felt a kind of elation. Just as we had when we first saw these weeds in the wind.


BackBack to Photo Corners