Beyond Layers Day 73--When Inspiration Hits

On Monday, in Beyond Layers, Kim showed us an image on the cover the book A Beautiful Disaster that she found to be inspirational. It was an image of a textured and very blue butterfly in a jar. The image can be seen here.

Kim urged us to use that image as inspiration only and create our own unique image. She also gave us a couple of lovely textures to try out.  I really liked the blue and the texture and the light of the book cover image.

At first, I was not going to process any of the photos I took of these dandelions (yet again) on this particular morning's shoot. Dandelions are not unique for me as a photographic subject. I love them and I cannot get enough. When I first went through the images of this shoot, though, I did not think anything was salvageable. I was a little disappointed because I had done everything technically 'right': I used a tripod; I used early morning light; I had on mirror lock up; I turned off my image stabilization; all of the things I should do. But I felt like the images did not work out. I wasn't sure about the focus. There was obvious movement (which was likely from a bit of breeze), etc. It was just not what I wanted to see with these images, I guess--not what I expected. However, after seeing Kim's post and wanting the inspiration to hit (and also just wanting to complete an exercise in this class because I have gotten myself terribly behind, again), I took another look. I decided this one could work as something to add a lot of processing and textures to . . . go a little overboard; have a little fun.

Below is the image I came up with. I did some cross processing, used Lightroom, Photoshop and Radlab and went heavy on both of Kim's new textures: 'steelish' and 'naturally'. I was a fun exercise.