We had some flooding a few weeks back in this area. This was a week after the fake hurricane came through. Our place was fine, though the sump pump was working overtime for about 48 hours. The water level in the nearest storm water management pond must have risen very high (3-4 feet?) in order to drape this pond scum over the fence like this.

September 10, 2011

This is a photo Jaime took when she went fishing with her dad last month. I don't usually do any "artsy" edits, but this one was so minimal that I decided to play with it. I may have overdone it a bit, but I like it. For point of reference, here is the original:

The first thing I did was straighten/rotate it and crop out all the land. If you don't show people the land (or the reflections of the land), they assume that the lake goes on forever.. it's a nice illusion. Then I highlighted the boat and trolling motor (the motor was tricky) and turned the saturation down until it was nearly black&white. I added all the color back into the boat myself with color filters. That's why it looks fakey-fake.

From there, everything was just trial-and-error from within Lightroom. I ended up blurring it by turning the Clarity to about -40 (which isn't really "blurring," but anyway). I adjusted the tones of the water by moving the Hue of the cyans and blues to the right a little bit. At one point I had it looking like the blue-green waters off the coast of Jamaica, but I decided that was a bit over the top.