Have you ever seen a photo that immediately draws you in. I mean, a photo that looks more like a painting, a work of art, rather than merely a photo taken with a piece of equipment. This is my favorite type of photography. I love using creative techniques and processing tools to make my photos come alive. If you’ve followed us for any amount of time, you know that we absolutely believe that imagination is where the magic happens!

So when a friend of ours shared this photo on Facebook and it popped up in my news feed, I was mesmerized by the balance of real vs. abstract. And after a few minutes of admiring the beautiful autumn colors and contrasting white of the trunks, I decided to reach out and ask, “Hey Scotty, what’s the story?” He was kind enough to take a few minutes and give us a behind the scenes peek at his thought process.

I’d like to introduce you to Scotty Perkins, an extremely talented wilderness, landscape, nature, and wildlife photographer from right here in our corner of the Pacific Northwest. His work has been featured by the U.S. Department of the Interior, as well as the Huffington post, among others.

The base exposure for this image was captured on a September hike with my wife on the lower portion of the trail up to Mt. Timpanogos in the Uinta Wilderness of Utah near Sundance.

The light was high overhead, not normally what I like to shoot in, but what caught my eye about the scene was the three distinct layers of yellow-green aspen leaves above, white bark of the trees in the middle, and the orange-red ground shrubs below. The light was entirely wrong for a traditional intimate landscape shot, but what makes fall aspens in particular very special is that they lend themselves to more artistic abstracts, specifically images that incorporate motion blur, either intentionally in-camera during the exposure (Intentional Camera Movement, or ICM) or in post-processing. So that’s the direction I chose to take this image.

Since I was not carrying my full kit, my options for capturing the exposure I wanted were limited. I had a travel tripod, my Canon 5D Mark III with Canon 24-105 f/4L zoom lens, and a circular polarizer. To do a proper ICM image in full overhead sun I would need a neutral density filter to slow the exposure. I decided to take the exposure straight, on the tripod, and make the abstract in post. That approach (to me) is not as appealing as doing the movement in-camera, but one benefit of this method is that you have a sharp exposure as the base which allows selective blurring and sharpening throughout the image with full control.

For this image I did my raw processing in Adobe Lightroom CC, using my standard raw workflow, including capture sharpening. I then took the raw image into Adobe Photoshop CC and applied blurring across the entire image. Then, using a soft brush at a low opacity, I selectively masked the blur in areas of detail I thought were interesting to highlight. I then finalized the image using some selective dodging and burning using the dodge and burn tools to bring out the contrast in the upper branches and in the shadows of the forest floor. The final presentation lent itself best to a 16:9 crop, one I use often, to highlight the balance of the color layers in the image.

Thank you very much for looking. I hope you enjoy it!

Canon 5D Mark III | Canon 24-105 f/4L lens at 105mm | f/11 | 1/20 sec. | ISO 100

We want to thank Scotty for taking the time to share his work with us! Please help us show him some love by leaving a comment below.