Lavender Honey

Lily 1

camera: likely my Canon Rebel xti
settings: unknown
behind the lens: me

Atop my spring cleaning list is "organize blog image files" because, in order to build some of the features of my new website, I need to locate and resize all Lavender Honey images to date. This may seem like a mundane, simple task and you're right, it would be - if I had been organized from the beginning. Not only are different versions of the same image saved on multiple computers, I've also been giving ambiguous names to photos, such as "cool lighting," "awesomeness," or "yum." Needless to say, my mindless spring cleaning task has turned into a puzzle.

I did, however, rediscover a few images along the way. These lilies are one such example. They live in our backyard, near the stairs to the deck. I remember photographing them sometime late last summer when their fragrance was at its peak. Lovely, aren't they? The smell of lilies reminds me of prom; not a specific prom, but many vague memories packed into one collective idea of what prom smells like.

Lily 2

***Photoshop Nerd Alert, Technical Discussion Ahead***

When I found the psd files for lily 1 and lily 2, they were untouched. Minimalist retouching is my taste these days, so both have very little adjustments. Lily 3 (below), on the other hand, has some more intensive retouching.

When I opened the file I could tell by the existing layers that I was using what I call my "Versace" Photoshop style. In 2006 Vincent Versace published a book called, Welcome to Oz 2.0: A Cinematic Approach to Digital Still Photography with Photoshop that shifted the way I used Photoshop and perceived digital photography. I scoured his book for tips on layer masking, especially his development of "image maps," which are essentially layer mask opacity maps. The other technical take-away for me, exemplified here in Lily 3, was his use of Lighting Effects (filter>render>lighting effects), specifically omli-lighting. The results in Lily 3 are far less severe than Versace's work, but it's interesting to see his influence on the image.

Lily 3

Below is an animated gif that attempts to illustrate how each successive layer changes the image. Pay particular attention to the foreground at the bottom of the image...the subtle shift is nice, no?

Going through my images has been a lot like cleaning out my closet - there are always a few forgotten gems tucked away, begging to be rediscovered!