Thistle Heads

When I took the dogs out this afternoon the wind was quite wild and blowing the reeds and thistle heads to kingdom come. I wanted to capture some of that in a single image.

My first attempt was to photograph the reeds caught in the wind as it swept across the lake. I then carefully superimposed a couple of images on top of one another and reduced the top layer to the tops of the reeds using the erasure tool and let that bleed into the underlying image by reducing the opacity.

My second attempt was to try and capture a full thistle head that had not been degraded by the wind with the surrounding heads clearly showing the effects of the wind. This proved to be more difficult as it was very hard to focus on the furry thistle head as it was being whipped around by the wind but with manual focus and several attempts I managed to the clarity of focus I needed. This I feel was the more successful image in terms of what I was wanting to capture but have a look in my portfolio at the other image and see what you think.

See Windy Reeds