Catch some rays.

When you’re tired of making the same old photos of your garden blooms, try this: manually zoom your lens during a long exposure (shutter speed here was one second) to capture your flower more unconventionally. In this shot of a coreopsis, the blooms surrounding the main one are rendered as ghostly streaks of colour.

I had some help from Lightroom to crop the image and darken sections to minimize distractions like the leaves and the detail in the soil.

Making this radiating effect in a photo was pretty fun. I think I’ll try it on some other kinds of subjects – food, toys, vehicles… maybe even a face, if I can get one of my cats/kids to hold still long enough (the exposure time was one whole second, so I may have to wait until they’re asleep).