Today’s photo (well, actually taken last night) is attempting a silhouette – where due to the lighting and exposure, the people are almost black. Works well with simple, identifiable shapes against plain backgrounds, like the sky. This shot is from the county fair, with people on bleachers watching the tractor pull.

Today’s experiment is trying a super-high-contrast look. The main processing was done with Topaz Adjust, with some other small changes afterwards.

Today’s experiment is trying a black and white HDR – I’ve tried a number of HDR’s in color, but this is the first time I have tried black and white. I used HDR Efex Pro. I didn’t like any of the monochrome presets. At first, I had trouble figuring out how to make the adjustments…

Today’s experiment is tilt-shift – applying the tilt-shift effect in Photoshop CS6 to a photo. The photo was one I took in 2005 in Central Park of The Gates – it was taken on slide film, and then I scanned the slide to convert it to digital, so the image is not of the highest…

Today’s experiment is using 2 cameras to take one photo. I’ve read about this technique using a twin-lens reflex and taking a photo of its viewfinder, producing an interesting vintage look. But since I don’t have a twin-lens reflex, this shot is simply an Iphone photo of my DSLR’s viewfinder. Might be an interesting technique…

Today’s experiment is not exactly photography – this image is produced by scanning. What I learned: getting all the dust off the scanner is critical, and frustrating composing isn’t easy, since you see the composition from the back side I couldn’t get one of those super-high-res scans due to my scanner’s limits – so this…

Today I tried a fisheye lens – so it didn’t take much effort (although I did find out that one can create a lot of boring images with a fisheye before finding some subject matter that works). I don’t have a fisheye lens for my DSLR, so this is using the olloclip fisheye on the…

Today’s experiment is focus stacking. I took 12 images of this flower, with a 60mm macro lens about 15 inches away.  With the lens set on manual focus, I moved the focus of the lens slightly between each photo.  Then I stacked the photos in Photoshop, and used the auto-blend layer stack option. The result…

Today’s experiment is lightpainting. This image was shot in a dark room, using a flashlight that had multicolor light.  For a few seconds, the scene was lit by the blue light from the flashlight, then with a quick burst of white light directed toward the middle of the scene.  I held the flashlight in one…

Today I created a photo montage.  Now that I am taking a lot of Iphone photos in square formats, I’m beginning to have some photos that can be combined effectively, like this set in blue.  I hope to someday have lots of potential combinations out of the photos I have taken.