I went back to the small pond with the cattails on Saturday; beautiful, cloudy light, captured at 170mm, f/11@1/13. Raw image processed in LR; tone and color tweaked a bit in PS. Applied Topaz/Detail, NIK/Tonal Contrast and then used the Motion Blur filter. Lowered the opacity on the Motion Blur layer to ~60%. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
John, I like this a lot. Excellent use of motion blur; it adds diffusion creating a glamor effect used in portraits. You made a simple image to an excellent one! The color patches with dark shadow is very nice. Nicely done.
John, nice glow effect. You might consider a slight CW rotation. Hot spot on the right edge, you may want to tone down. Otherwise nicely see, serene image.
Glowing cattails! Nicely done, John. If this were mine, I might consider taking a little off the lower edge of the image. To me, the reflection seems to compete a bit with the glow effect.
Love the effect - it reminds me of Nik's glamour glo filter. The comp. is nice with the bent grass at a perfect place within the frame. I might clean up the bright spot on the right edge as Jay pointed out. I also agree on the ever so slight rotation. Very nice work John!
Thank you all for your comments and suggestions. Jay and Denise, good catch on the hot spot (how did I miss that??)...and I wasn't sure about the rotation at first, but once done (expanded the image on all sides, rotated, then cropped back to the original) I have to agree it was spot on!