This barn is located in Minnesota, just a few miles south of Fargo-Moorhead.  It was obviously rural at one time, but the city is starting to encroach upon this area.

I’ve been taking a four-seasons series of this barn from this vantage point, and happened to find the perfect lighting for the reflection in the water one day last spring.

The original image for this flower in the round was a delphinium growing near the wall of a garage in a friend’s garden.  I liked both the flower and the setting for several reasons.  First, there aren’t that many truly blue flowers – most being in the lavender, violet or magenta colors – and this was a beautiful specimen.  Second, the garage wall had been painted over without stripping the previous cracked coat of paint.  That paint provided an interesting texture to the picture.  I took the picture last year, but first tested it as a “Flower in the Round” recently.

The original image is shown below.

We’ve stayed in this B&B a couple of times now.  The innkeepers are most hospitable.

This image is an HDR taken in mid-morning on a fall day in 2011.  Great fun (both the B&B and HDR pix)

We were at the zoo with granddaughters Kayla and Madison in October of ’08 while their parents went to a Wisconsin Badgers game.  This one has interesting shapes that are the black branches of the tree being “bent” by the process.

This picture was taken along the Mississippi River near Maiden Rock, Wisconsin in 2008.  The unprocessed image was taken from underneath a birch tree aiming up at the sky through the leaves.

Early wisps of fall air are upon us, and there is the forecast of an earlier-than-normal freeze tonight.  This weather is the complete opposite of the hot humid air of a few months ago.  (For those not familiar with northern climes, mid-winter and mid-summer are opposites in terms of temperature extremes, but both of them keep one concerned about keeping his or her body comfortable.  This early fall air is the opposite in the sense of being completely comfortable inside or out.  Maybe I’ll change my tune when it rains, but that’s my story for now.)

I’m going to start publishing seasonal Flowers in the Round soon, and the deep fall colors are my favorite.  These mums, though, captured the colors of early fall – reds and greens with a blue sky.

Spring blossom, bright sun

We’re going to bring a couple of Flowers in the Round to the front page here.  This first one was taken despite fears that taking a direct image of the sun would damage the sensor of the camera.  It wasn’t damaged, so I lucked out.

This picture was taken with a Nikon D90 and a Nikon 12-24 lens at focal length of 14mm, f22 and 1/200 exposure.  The camera was held on the ground, pointing up at the underside of this blossom, with a tree and the sun in the background.

This picture is one of my favorite examples of what can be done with Flowers in the Round, and is hanging on the wall of our offices printed at 20×20 inches.

This photo of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris is one of my favorites, and this rendition of the image illustrates something that is hard to describe without an example.  That is, sometimes less detail tells more of the story.

There are a million photos of this structure already.  And most of those are better than the one I took and are available on 50 cent postcards in the gift shops under the apartments on the left of the cathedral.  What impressed me most on this day was the hundreds of visitors lining up to get inside Notre Dame and how the towers of the building dwarfed them.

The original photo was too detailed – both the people and the cathedral – and this detail detracted from what I saw in the relationship of the large throng to the much larger structure.

I used a plugin called ToonIt! from Digital Anarchy to overpaint this picture, resulting in this image that is clearly Photoshopped, decreased in detail, yet lets me tell the story the way I saw it.

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Here’s a bonus addition to the Notre Dame Cathedral.  This picture is of votive candles floating in a pool in one of the ante rooms.  I’ve Photoshopped this image in the same way as the Flowers in the Round or Fireworks in the Round.

Here’s a closeup of a hibiscus flower and a “Flowers in the Round” rendition of that same hibiscus.

Every time I see a hibiscus flower, I am reminded of a summer treat that is in many Starbucks stores in Europe, but I’ve never had it here in the states.  Starbucks in Paris sells a hibiscus flavored lemon ice cooler that is sooo refreshing in the heat, but doesn’t leave you with that heavy aftertaste that their smoothies do here.  Bring it across the Atlantic, Starbucks.