"In camera" Orton Imagery

[mpreslar]

Hey Folks,

I haven't had much time to post lately. I have been kept busy with home and work and photographing my son's baseball games. It is a lot of fun, but preparing the pictures for the team web site is a bunch of work!

Anyway, this is my attempt at doing "In camera" Orton Imagery (See http://www.naturephotographers.net/a.../dw0106-1.html for details of the technique)

In this case, I experimented with the exposure settings. The slide technique calls for the second "blurred shot" to be overexposed by 1 stop while the long DOF shot is overexposed by 2 stops. I did the blurred shot at both 1 and 2 stops of overexposure, and found that 2 stops worked better when combining the images in PSE.

Here are the specifics on the two shots:
Both: 28mm, ISO-100, +2 stops, tripod.
Sharp: f/18, 1/15s.
Blurred: f/3.5, 1/400s.

The second version was done with the 1 stop blurred shot. Unfortunately, my CF card eat the original, so I had to "recreate" the 1 stop version by raw processing. I underexposed the one used above by one stop in the raw converter.

I then simply combined the converted RAW files in PSE and used the "Multiply" blending method. Other than resizing to post, no other editing involved.

Please let me know what you think?

[mondo1090]

i honestly do not know much about photography yet as i am just starting out, i dunno i do not really care much for the first image, and i can not place, why but i love the second image, the tree seems to stand out alittle more and the color just seems to be better, well thats what i think atleast, good job

[CLKunst]

I was just mentioning this technique the other day but didn't remember the proper "name" for it. Thanks for the reference! I just used this on some images today that needed some help. I think it's such a neat trick although I suppose like anything can become cliche if over done. Lovely cherry blossom scene you've used to illustrate the effect.

Regards,

[Sebastian]

For those who want to do this digitally:

Open the image in Photoshop or another program that has layers with blending modes.

Duplicate the image to a second layer.

Gaussian blur the new duplicate image a bit.

Set the blending mode to overlay.

Adjust opacity to get the desired look.

[mpreslar]

Thanks for the comments everyone.

Mondo: When I was posting, I was a bit more drawn to the 2nd one myself. But, I still feel that the grass is underexposed and too much detail is lost in the bottom part of the image. I like the sky and the tree better there though.

CL: Yes, it can get old. I have been doing some experimentation with digital versions of it using originals that have shallow DOF instead of long DOF. In those you get a real 3D effect that I love!

Seb: The link I posted has a different version using two layers. 1st a dup layer using the "screen" blending method. Flatten that and then do a dupe layer of that, apply gausian blur at between 15 and 50 pixels, and use the "multiply" blending method. It works great! (See my "Orton Imagery Daffodils" post from a couple of months ago for an example.)

[mpreslar]

OOPS! I just realized the "above link" is incomplete! Here is the real link: http://www.naturephotographers.net/a.../dw0106-1.html

Sorry!