Fairae Lights
The luminous effect in these photos is reasonably easy to achieve—and has nothing to do with Photoshop. It is a pure photographic effect, achieved using good old-fashioned photographic tools and an understanding of the key elements of exposure.
View this photograph larger.
It’s one way to enjoy macro flower photography on a windy day. You need flowers with contrasting colors in motion. The idea is to focus on one of the contrasting flowers. Ideally, the in-focus flower will be relatively still. The other flower will be out of focus, and is often postioned in front of the “sharper” flower. The out-of-focus flower should be blowing in the wind.
Use a tripod. Set the shutter speed/aperture pairing so that the relatively stiller flower that is in-focus will be rendered fairly literally, while the foreground out-of-focus flowers that are waving madly in the breeze become a luminous blur.
As you might expect, this technique takes a great deal of trial and error, and usually a whole bunch of lousy photos for each good one.
This is the technique I used to photograph this California poppy a while back:
View this photograph larger. Read the original blog entry about this photo.
