This is one from today that I just had to toss up here quickly. This is not a composite, or Photoshop job, or anything of the sort, but straight out of the camera. Almost, anyway – I did a slight color tweak; sue me. But I honestly wasn’t expecting results quite like this.
Here’s what you’re looking at. These tiny bluet flowers (Houstonia caerulea) were growing from a mossy bank right on the edge of a river. Shooting with the Mamiya 80mm macro wide open at f4, the depth-of-field was very short, resulting in everything but the specific blossoms that I’d focused upon to be out of focus. In the background, the sun was reflecting off of the water rippling past some rocks. Each of these sparkles is rendered into a vague circle by being very far out of focus against a dark background, in this case the bottom of the river, while the other flowers and stems and such, a bit closer, get rendered in varying degrees of softness. This page might help explain the optical aspect of it slightly better.
Whatever. I gotta admit I like it a lot. It also serves to illustrate why shooting position can be so important. There was a very narrow angle that captured the sunlight reflecting from the ripples, and half-a-meter in any direction would not have produced this effect. So, yeah…