09 Sep 16. A couple weeks back while roaming around the Pt Townsend area we visited the Far Reaches Farm, a nursery with a large array of unusual flowers. I wrote about the farm earlier in the mailing of the red hot poker. In one large covered area was a fairly good sized plant whose flowers were trumpet shaped and a few of which were situated such that during a portion of our visit the sun was shining through the trumpet from the back, sort of like one blowing air, but in this case light, from the "mouth" to the bell. I thought it rather interesting and took several shots. They came out nice and really showed off the lighting effect well, but they were all too busy due to the proximity of several competing blossoms. So I took one I thought representative of the group, cropped it tight, then selected just the blossom, inverted that selection and first turned it almost black, then added a water droplet texture to simulate rain fall on a supposed window in the background. (You won't see that in this version as I've darkened it further to emphasize the glowing trumpet.)That wasn't quite realistic as the flower was too sharply defined against the background, so I blurred just the flower and with a mask confined the blur just to the edges of the petals to make it all blend together a bit more realistically. I almost pulled it off, but the manipulations didn't quite work as desired on the two right petals so by going with this darker version I've effectively turned that failed part into what looks like a rim light.
The base image was thoroughly manipulated as described above. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/640 sec @ f / 5.6.
