I made this image a few weeks ago at the Botanical Dreaming workshop. It’s a montage of an orchid photograph taken at the workshop and a photo of some clouds that I had in my files. I really liked the concept, but wanted to try some different clouds to see if they would work better. After shooting several more cloud photos and trying them in the montage, I ended up returning to the original image.

“If photography is truly an art, then what it expresses is human emotion. Not what the world looks like. … It’s not about what’s in front of you, it’s about what’s inside of you. … Expression, that’s what its all about. Artistic expression, not objective duplication.”

– Brooks Jensen

Once again, Brooks is right on. It’s not that a straight photograph can’t be expressive. It’s just that sometimes it is necessary to go beyond the original photograph to achieve the expression you want. The images above are of a bridge and fall foliage along one of the carriage paths in Acadia NP. The top image uses a soft glow montage combined with a Pixel Bender OilPaint filter to create a glowing, painterly look. The bottom image is the original for comparison. I like them both. The bottom image is more photorealistic while the one on top is more evocative. It better expresses the mood created by the soft light and gentle rain that accompanied the moment.

For more on the soft glow montage/Pixel Bender technique, see Mark Johnson’s Photoshop Workbench Number 263.

This photo is from a series that I took in the Quinault Rain Forest in Olympic National Park last June. I had processed another image from this series as a straight photograph of tree trunks and ferns. Although it is a decent stock photo, it doesn’t appeal to me on an emotional level. Last weekend, while exploring some techniques for creating impressionist effects in Photoshop, I had another look at this image. While it wasn’t suitable for the techniques I was exploring, it did give me an idea. I used the Motion Blur filter to remove detail and make it more abstract. Some luminosity adjustments and the addition of a soft glow completed the image. The result is much more like what I felt when I was there. (For more on the soft glow effect, visit the tutorials section of  Tony Kuyper’s website.)