Finding A New Perspective…

…through a camera lens.

This week I went out with the intention of capturing something on film from a lot of different angles. As many as possible. When I was planning on where I was going to go, and what I was going to photograph, I remembered a little park my wife and I had walked along during the summer. I remember looking across the lake there on that warm summer day and seeing a beautiful mirror image of the trees and bushes reflecting brilliantly. I wanted to see if I could capture that same brilliance that I saw that day. With that intent, I watched for a day when there was going to be a break in the constant winter gray overcast sky to make the shoot possible. I got lucky, and yesterday was the first day that I was able to get out and do it. I left my home and began to walk towards the park, but I never made it to the spot I had planned on going. Before one can walk into the park, there is a common area with a playground, tennis courts, pavilions, etc. This year, we have had a really warm winter, so most of the snow has melted, and all over this common area were the perfect, lake like puddles. In fact, these puddles were so fantastically large, that they reminded me of that summer day so much that I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to shoot right there. And so I did!

The subject that I focused my efforts on was a particular tree (the center most tree in the featured image above), and I included it in every shot. It was rather interesting. Some of the shots I had to lay in puddles, mud pits, and one of them I had to balance myself on a sheet of ice in order to get the image I was wanting. I’ll let you guess which those were, but needless to say, my wife wasn’t the most thrilled when I finally came home afterwards… but it was totally worth it.

Below are the top nine of the hundreds of images from the shoot. If you click on the images, you will be able to see it a bit larger as well. (If you want to know any of the metadata, like I have been providing the last few weeks on my images, leave a comment and I will be happy to get that right to you!) I will talk about one of them at the end, so don’t leave once you flip through them!

If you are still reading, I want to talk about that last image. Notice something different about it? This last week I had also been learning about applying different textures to images in Photoshop in a course I am taking. I wanted to try it a little bit on one of my images from this shoot. So, I went to one of the last remaining snow piles in that common area, and took these two images. Using Photoshop, I then went in and laid the two images on top of the tree, angled them to match the direction of the tree trunk, and then lowered the opacity of the two, making them almost completely transparent. I then applied a mask on the trunk and major branches to make them pop a bit more from the background. I was just experimenting, but let me know what you thought, and as always, any tips for improvement are always welcome!