Joanne Mason Photography

Anne’s challenge to us this week is Zooming. At first, I had no idea how to proceed. While Anne has in mind zooming with a zoom lens, I do not own a zoom lens. Years ago, I did. But I found working with prime lenses gave me better image quality and forced me to think more carefully about composition. I also had to economize on my kit. So today, I only use prime lenses. How then was I going to adress this challenge???

Then it occurred to me that I’ve been working to explore more of Photoshop and trying to get better at it. Maybe Photoshop would make it possible for me to emulate zooming by editing existing photographs. It took me a while to figure out how this could be done. But I did, and I am very pleased with the results. I’m grateful for Anne’s challenge because it made me learn something new, something which, in the pursuit of creative art, I’ll certainly explore more.

So, here goes! I found that images with color work best. Images with flowers, though not exclusively, work especially well. This image is a red camellia.

The following image is a magnolia tree in bloom, which I shot recently. I learned to explore different degrees of zooming. An image didn’t necessarily need to be zoomed to extremes to produce a nice picture.

Following is a reasonably macro shot of a cluster of Queen Anne’s Lace flowers.

Here is a purple and yellow iris flower. This is one of my favorites.

This one is a zoomed image of a large azalea with pink flowers.

The next image is a Peony. The image has been zoomed, and also a few other creative edits.

This image is of some California wildflowers.

The final image is a red dahlia. This is another example of how the image need not be zoomed too extremely, although I did do a couple of other edits as well.

There we have it. I hope my attempt to meet the challenge, through software rather than zoom lens, will be acceptable. Once I figured out how to do this, I certainly enjoyed it. And I’m sure I explore these methods further.

Thanks to Anne for this week’s challenge. Next week is Ritva’s turn to challenge us. I’m looking forward to it. If you’re interested in joining the Lens Artists Challenge, you’ll find more information here.