Into the Light

This image is most decidedly a composite. Back in 2016 I was taking deliberately out of focus images of our flower gardens to potentially use as backgrounds. On July 6th I took one such and by sheer coincidence we had some really cool striated clouds that evening. A few days later when processing I got the idea of combining the color from the garden with the striations from the clouds to create the background. At the time, that was all I did and itsat there for 4 1/2 years. This last year was rather full of losses among my acquaintances and relatives and I’ve been working on sympathy cards a lot. I happened to run across that file again and the idea of adding the hummingbird occurred to me. After searching bunches of hummingbird images in my files, I found one taken only a week from the background images that appealed to me. The rest was just adjusting saturation, tonality and light to get the effect I was looking for.

Garden image:

Cloud image:

Specific Feedback Requested

Anything.

Technical Details

Is this a composite: Yes
Garden taken with a 7DII and 150-600 at 546 mm, I used the same equipment for the hummingbird, but don’t recall the focal length (probably 600 mm). The cloud formation was taken with a 5DIII and 70-200 f/4 lens at 70 mm. I combined the garden and cloud shots by using the garden as the base layer and the clouds above it at reduced opacity (I suspect I’d try a different method these days, but it got me where I wanted to go).

1 Like

Very thoughtful of you Dennis. The photo turned out really well. An interesting creative process to use three different images of different aspects of nature and then combine them to get a lovely result.

Sorry to hear of your losses, Dennis. Excellent image and skillful processing. Looking at the image I can’t shake the sense that the bird is being pulled into a large gravitational well.

I like it because on first thought the hummingbird would naturally be blurred to the naked eye and the flower crystal clear. And, in your photo it is the complete opposite : )

What an interesting and idea. And the execution is very nice. I have nothing to add to David’s comments. Very cool. (Also I just noticed the watermark–that is fantastic!)

Wonderful composition, Dennis. The background is perfect here as the set of diagonal lines give the image great flow with the bird on the top right.

Very nice Dennis, the emotion comes through in the work…

Such stunning, creative work! I’m sorry for your losses, I feel your pain.

All creativity and nicely executed ! The results looks very nice. Cheers, Hans

Hi Dennis, this image looks terrific and is quite creative. Quite inspiring too - I may try my hand at something like this. Love the colors and placement of the bird in the frame. Very pleasing image.

I’m sorry for the losses you mentioned.