Day 18
Today's photography challenge was all about photographing parts of a car up close. That gave me the opportunity to clean up my inside mess (see yesterday) and get some fresh air. The goal of the entire challenge is to create abstracts. Joel Edelman, who is running the challenge, stresses that the images probably aren't going to be award winners. Just creative expressions. I'm finding it quite relaxing to experiment. I am also learning a lot.
Several people who are doing challenge mentioned that they don't own a macro lens. Joel showed that it is possible to simulate one by taking a regular lens and holding it backwards against the camera, a technique referred to as freelensing. I tried it and I am glad that I actually own a macro lens. It seems too easy to drop a handheld lens or to get something on the sensor.
My goal each day is to choose a handful of photos from the dozens I take and then work with them in post processing. From those, I choose two.
This first one for today is a tail light, as you might have guessed. In addition to the the various adjustments I made to the image, I used the Photoshop smudge tool on parts of the image. I might do some other things to the image, but for now this is it.
I think the next image is the side of a side view mirror—one of the ones that have a signal built in or it could be a back up light. You know it has to be an abstract when the image maker can't recall exactly what part it is! After cropping and applying an Edward Hopper effect (in Topaz Studio), I rotated the image. Then I made a copy, flipped that copy, and applied a blend more to combine the two images. I made quite a few other adjustments in Photoshop.
