Writer’s Block: try some oil

If you’re following my blog then you’ve probably noticed that I’ve taken the last 3 months off. I do apologize to my readers. The delay has not been due to a lack of shooting; it’s because I’ve been working so hard at my day job that I just haven’t had much to say.

Recently though, one of my coworkers was going to throw away her Valentine’s Day roses at the end of that week and right then I got a little frisson of inspiration and saved the flowers from the grabage bin. I took them home, set them up by a window, and shot with my macro lens.

Here is the original with a little Lightroom 3.6 adjustment

Tossed Away Rose

Image above made with a Nikon D300 camera and Nikon 105 VR macro lens

While the image is fine, it needed a little something else… and I couldn’t think of a thing.

Fortunately, another bright idea landed upon me right after I heard some wonderful news: a special van Gogh exhibit will be at the Philadelphia Museum of Art between Feb 1 and May 6. Now Vincent van Gogh is probably my favorite painter of all time so I would love the opportunity to see more of his work, especially since several reviewers say that this exhibit is not to be missed.

So, with van Gogh in my head and no paintbrushes to be found, I tried some software that had been laying dormant since late fall. In a raffle at the Nature Visions expo last November, I won Alien Skin‘s bundled software package. I was really pleased with the win because I had wanted to purchase Bokeh 2 but could not justify the cost. Nonetheless, I had only installed the package, opened each plug-in to see if it really worked, and played with Bokeh 2.

In this instance, however, SnapArt 3 was just the ticket. I looked at each preset but went right back to the factory defaults for Oil Painting.