Water Meadows

Its a given isn't it, that if you take a trip without your camera, you'll see something so superbly photogenic that you'll bite yourself!
Thus for me, (who's sick of biting himself!) I'll now do no laborious airport run without my camera.
And here's an image to prove my maxim right, as I noticed this as I entered Montpellier's little local airport. I swung the old Volvo around and parked in a lay-by. The setting sun lasting just long enough for me
to take a few dozen join-able shots.

This is composed of three overlapped vertical shots from left to right,
I used Autopano-giga to stitch the images together, ending up with a large 5000 x 5000+ Pixel image. Trees are my favorite subjects to Texture, and Autumnal trees are the best, topped only by trees in the mist for superb texturing.

People ask what kind of picture textures best? And we always say a picture that has some kind of 'softness' about it. Thus we can say Flash photography generally doesn't texture well, and images in very bright sunlight, however I have textured many bright afternoon shots so those rules aren't written in stone!

For this Autumn season we'd like to welcome many new Fly members, brought to us through Tony Sweet and his famous photographic School in America! For their benefit and Justin Cline, Tim Vollmer and John Barclay schools, all hot tagged in the sidebar, and our loyal members, I'll go over a few things we might have said before about basic texturing. For most images I personally start by sorting out a problem sky, I try to balance the top with the darker bottom whenever I can. (btw, get yourself a circular polarized filter, for land and seascapes they are superb!)

Here the sky was very bright, so I doubled the base image and turned the top copy to B/W. I then played with the contrast, darkening certain colours blue mostly with the filter sliders.
When happy I brushed off the darker green part of the image leaving a beefed up sky, made transparent with the Multiply filter @ 54%.
For Autumnal trees, my favorite Flypaper texture has to be from the first Fly pack, Apple Blush.
So I'll always pull this texture up first, thankfully its easy to remember, for trees = Apple Blush!
I normally rotate it until I get the best result, if I have one side too dark,
I'll double it up and flip the top layer, adjusting the opacity, until a happy balance is found.
I could have left it like this, but with the New fly Summer Painterly, we can go further, getting a painterly effect without using photopshops Paint filters, which always degrade an image.

So I applied the rest as follows in the texture recipe below.
Base Image enhanced with a slight HDR effect in the new CS5
Base image B/W copy - Multiply @ 54% Base green part brushed away.
Apple Blush - Soft Light @ 54%
Rose Blush - Overlay @ 87%
Matmos Lake - Desaturated - Soft Light @ 100% Flipped vertically and blurred.
Left hand base corner brushed away as it was getting too dark.
Aquarius - Desaturated - Overlay @ 70%
See a bigger finished version on Flickr
Both this and similar images can be seen on my Photoshelter.

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