Feel the energy

It was the spring after my camera had been stolen from directly in front of me by muggers in London. My heart pounded in fear every time I thought about taking my replacement camera outdoors. The term "panic attack" definitely applied despite all of my internal coaching. Following my own policies adopted from Julia Cameron's book, The Artist's Way, I tried to find a safe environment to regain my courage. The safe environment came from a friend and farmer who allowed me onto his property to make photographs. This potato blossom was one of the photos emerging from that experience. It was so good to be close to the land, to feel the sun's warmth, and to overcome massive fear.

This photograph was made on trust. I couldn't actually see through the camera as it was resting on the ground. I could only aim in general toward the plant and the sky. It only took a few tries with the zoom lens set to 28mm.

There was a lot of contrast in this photo. So much so, in fact, that I opened the raw file in Adobe Camera Raw several times, changing the exposure values each time and individually saving the resulting files. By using the Merge to HDR function in Photoshop, I was able to get detail wherever I wanted it. This process, called pseudo-HDR, comes in handy when you can't stabilize your camera for an entire series of photos set to different exposures. HDR is discussed at length in Photo 1: An Introduction to the Art of Photography.