Beauty is all around us. You don’t have to journey thousands of miles to an exotic location with many pounds of  gear to make a good photograph. Often, you can find one in or very close to your back yard. And since you know your area better than any other, you know where the beauty is. Make a photo of it.

Reeds, pond, sky

I went for a walk after dinner last night and photographed the sky reflected in this pond not very far from my home. We have an obligation to notice, capture and share the beauty all around us with others.

Technical notes:  I made this photo (with a small camera and no tripod) using the technique I described in this post.  Here though, I used four images instead of two.  Because I had four source images, I didn’t try to blend them by hand.  Once I auto-aligned the layers, I used Photoshop’s “auto-blend” layers capability.  I also used one extra technique: white balance blending.  When I imported the four original photos into Photoshop, I set the white balance to “daylight”.  When I finished blending them and had them back into Lightroom, the clouds looked good, but the rest of the image was too warm.  So I made a virtual copy, did an auto white balance adjustment on it and then blended these two versions in Photoshop using a layer mask.  The resulting master file is 4668 x 6352 pixels (~30 megapixels).

Thanks for stopping by and reading my blog. Now – go make some photos!
©2011, Ed Rosack. All rights reserved