The Edge

This morning I had no hope of capture anything of interest. But as simply strolling around just felt strange, I slung the camera over my shoulder to give me at least the appearance of purpose ;-)
36 photos and a quick screening of the results later I saw one or two images with potential. Fortunately I had captured enough variations of the theme to pick the most fitting for my purpose. That means for me e.g. that the texture has to show (shot at f11) and not get lost in too shallow dof as was the case with the f2.8 and f5.6 shot. Then I went through some heavy post-processing even using tools not available in Lightroom (*shock*). Thus I created

The Edge:

Drawn to the dark edge, the air is sucked into the void...

What I like about this image:
- abstract, not easy to identify the "original". Makes you trying to solve the enigma
- not over-processed, so the original colors, textures and forms still "shines through"
- reduced color-palette, nicely complementary
- lines/curves leading to "the edge"

Rising, shifting, dancing in the night

Eureka! After going at the same subject again and again I finally distilled an abstract worth posting:


Processing was done to "hide" the original subject, although still with the basic tools from Lightroom.
What I like about this image: The patterns, the glowing bars of light, the rise from the dark, and the inherent organic movement.
Have a look at the largest size (just click through the image): there is a fine texture to it. And that might just give you a clue as to what was the source of these rising, shifting, dancing columns of light

Color

Got this one when testing the new Nikon AF-S 28-300mm VR lens. Shot into the low sun and everything turned golden...



Technically there was some shifting in haze/glare when I took the photo, which turned out to be influenced by the image stabilization: Obviously at a certain position of the VR lens-group veiling glare was more prominent than in another position. I tried to capture it with minimal glare. But this is hard, when shooting with the sun shining into your lens.
This is a clear example of abstractification through quite some reduction in the color palette. And that without the use of any trick, filter or post-processing. You just have to look...

Perspective

Interesting how you start guessing what this is - because you have no hint of perspective. Someone asked me whether this was a burnt forest from an airplane. But no, this is it not:



I did some quite some post-processing on this one (at least for me) to make it more surreal. But the out-of-focus areas should have given you a hint that this was not shot from 1000 meters above ground but more likely is a close-up. Which it is!