Today’s experiment is faking the weather. This iPhone shot was taken in full sunlight (yes, the reflecting pool is in the process of being refilled, after two years of repairs!), and then two iPhone apps were used – one to add the lightning (AlienSky) and one to add the rain and gloom (RainyDaze). Clearly fake…

Today’s experiment is a zoom burst – zooming the lens while the shutter is open.  This shot was hand-held, standing in the  middle of Pennsylvania Avenue.  Different/better results can be gotten when using a tripod.

Today is experimenting with subject matter – creating The Scream out of food (carrots, blueberries, hummus, cinnamon sticks, eggplant, butter, peppercorns, dried strawberries, cocoa powder). Kind of pointless but fun. The main photographic challenge was finding a way to photograph it so that the light did not glare off the elements too much – the…

Today’s experiment is using the oil paint filter in Photoshop CS6: This filter is very easy to use, with 4 sliders for brush controls and 2 for lighting controls – giving more or less detail to the strokes.  It works well on this photo with simple shapes.  I first tried it on a more complex…

Today’s experiment is creating a microplanet. Here’s the Statue of Liberty on top of the world (glad that Photoshop knows more about polar coordinates than I remember from school)   The technique is very easy (using Photoshop’s polar distort filter) but getting something that looks decent is tough.  The big issue is finding a type…

Today I tried to photograph smoke. New to me: buying incense (I’d heard that it smoked the best), then not being able to find matches so using a lighter for the first time (how did I make it this far in life with never figuring out how to use a lighter before?)    

Trying to get a great splash shot like ones I’ve seen. Well, could have done better if I had a lot more patience, and probably had I used something thicker like cream rather than mixing water, milk, red food dye, orange juice, and V-8 juice, i.e., whatever was in the refrigerator. Also, it was one…

Restoring the Wye Oak The Wye Oak, Maryland’s official tree, was about 460 years old when it died in 2002. This image is from a slide I took a number of years ago, with lots of damage – streaks, stratches, dust, mildew, etc. (hey, don’t store slides in your basement), which I now restored to…

Where are the tourists? At this time of year, Lafayette Square is loaded with tourists, but none are in this image: The solution is to take multiple photos, each with the tourists in slightly different places, then combine them in Photoshop. Photoshop offers an automated way to do this – using “image stack”, designed for…

Today’s experiment is a panorama. I took 10 shots of the World War II Memorial, overlapping each one. As to how much overlap, it varied since the shots were handheld and composed by trying to stay still except to move my direction by moving my feet. I took them in vertical format so that there…