Ice-Cream, Snow & Flowers

This is me all over. Here I'm trying to catch up with the Beyond Layers course, and yet I find myself watching the video Kim presented and trying the techniques not once, no, but three times. Really, am I so hopeless at making a quick work of something? But then, I'm supposed to be learning from this, and as we all know, repetitio mater studiorum est! Furthermore, I did what Kim suggested and tweaked her recipe for each image, discarding some layers and modifying others.

So, here are my takes for the day 34 challenge A Few Tips & Tricks to Try. The challenge included the use of the texture Chase and the use of a recipe Kim presented to us on video.

The first picture was taken on 9 May, 2010 at Keukenhof, Amsterdam. The flower is incredible, a tulip called Ice-Cream, with a good reason.

Tulip Ice-Cream

Resources used:
- texture Chase by Kim Klassen

I did the processing on this a month ago, and followed the recipe too faithfully - and it was my dissatisfaction with this that actually lead me to try another take. But I was clever and instead of tweaking the same image over again I let it be and took another photo to process.

The second photo was shot far more recently, on 5 December, 2012, and the Bohemian Knotweed (Fallopia x bohemica) in the picture is located right outside the fence of our yard. About the plant itself -- for the longest time we've been wondering whether the Knotweed in question is actually a Giant Knotweed (jättitatar in Finnish) or a Japanese Knotweed (japanintatar). Yesterday I googled the case once more and found out that it might actually be a cross between the two! In English, Bohemian Knotweed sounds quite nice and sensible, but the Finnish name, hörtsätatar, makes me giggle. It sounds funny and means nothing at all, suggesting something sort of tousled or dishevelled… well, I guess that suits the plant.

Laden with Snow

Here I went through the recipe but tweaked each layer, and finally ended up NOT using the texture that was part of the challenge. So, although this time I was happy with the result, I had to try again with an image where I'd be happy using Kim's texture.

Orange Gerbera

This is another photo of the session with my belated birthday bouquet. Followed the recipe, not cloning anything in or out, but started with high pass, then used the Gaussian blur but only a touch in the corners, lightened the image with levels adjustment, then darkened the blurred areas with just a tad of black to white gradient, used two colour fill layers, screen and multiply, but only around 10% each, and finally added Kim's texture Chase at 73% colour burn, but masked it out of the Gerbera. The change from the original is rather subtle, but pleases me.

Back to the real world -- doggies demand to get out. Better go and see if the birds still have something to eat. In the morning there were seeds enough at all the feeding posts, and since I had to chop firewood and carry it inside, I didn't take the trouble of adding any. Now off to take care of both the winged and the four-legged.