The other day we got home from work and Squirt really, really wanted to go out on the porch.  So did Whiskey.  How to say no to two adorable cats?  So I grabbed my macro lens and extension tubes and we all went outside.  While the boys sniffed the breeze and chased lizards, I photographed flowers.  One of my favorite daylilies, a pale pink variety with a yellow center, was in bloom.  I took it into the shade and photographed it from all sorts of angles.  When Rich called us in to dinner, the cats and I were both surprised.  We’d been out there for an hour, and I spent the whole time with one flower!

I found a cool tutorial online for doing filmstrip effects with digital images.  I thought it would be fun to use this format to showcase some of the different images that I made of the daylily.  The main image is just a color blur of one of the petals.  The top right is the traditional shot of the center of the flower with a large depth of focus.  The middle shot focuses on just the stamens (boy it is hard to get them all in the same plane so that they are all focused, without any foreground blur!)  The bottom shot is a close-up of the frilly edges of the petals, with some Fractalius added to emphasize the delicate lines of the flower.

After a gentle rain, the flower had some water on it.  I took this picture of a stamen lying on a petal, then processed it with Color Efex Pro to add a vignette and darken the colors a bit.  Then I started to play with other filters.  All the remaining images in this blog entry are from the image below.

This one applied the Flaming Pear Twist filter.  The result makes me think of oil paints.  I like it.

This one is a simple Fractalius filter.  I thought the neon colors were cool.

This one uses the Flaming Pear Swerve filter to contort the image.  This one reminds me of “Starry Night” (maybe the bits of pollen remind me of stars!)  There was something about the patterns in this one that I really liked.

Well, at least Squirt got plenty of porch time while I experimented! :)