It has been a really windy day. I tried some flower photography and I succeeded surprisingly well, helped by the relatively protected site and then just simply waiting for a lull in the wind. But it is also possible to use wind to your advantage and produce motion blur on purpose. I even experimented with second curtain flash but I guess the built-in flash is not made for the job. I think I will stick with natural light photography… I’m only posting this to illustrate how bad I am with the flash. LOL!

This gave me an idea though, so at editing stage I took one of the worst motion blur images plus a sharp, un-flashed image, then cut the sharp flower and layered it on top of the blurred one, applied multiply on the flower layer and now it looks a bit better… well, marginally. Just don’t look too close, I did a quick job with the selection and didn’t bother to tidy it up:

Playing with the flash is only fun so long and I was tired of the wind as well. Buildings and rocks were just about the only things that didn’t move in the wind, so I headed to the hembygdsgården and set up shop in front of my favourite building there – with wind blown ferns in the foreground. Out came the polarizer again and I stopped down to get an exposure of 1 second to produce motion blur in the ferns. I’m glad to say that this approach worked a whole lot better than my flash experiments! When I was editing the images, I decided to try the Orton technique to enhance the effect and I must say that I like it. As long as the weather continues windy like this, I will be doing more experiments – digitally!