Sun, Earth and Moon Composite

First I want to mention and support a fellow photographic blogger Damien Franco of ‘Your Photo Tips Blog with the launch recently of his endeavour to open a new sharing forum for photographers called Exposure . Not only is this a great place to learn and share from others but also there will be 8 prizes given away with this launch.

I have become a member and I encourage you to join so we can all learn and enjoy photography from each other.

My Giveaway of 2 Signed Prints

Well it’s now September and as I stated in a previous articles, I will be giving away 2 signed prints of your choice by random selection. All that you have to do is leave a comment in any article published in the month of September that lets me know you want a free print. You do need to mention the word ‘print’ so that I don’t confuse a comment with a spam comment. If you don’t feel comfortable with a public comment then please contact me via email.

I will be collecting the requests during the entire month and at the end of September I will, with the aid of a random number generator, select the 2 winners. These will be shipped for free to anywhere in the world (I hope you are not in an Antarctic station right now) in a tube container.

The images will be your choice and up to a size of approximately 13in x 19in on archival paper. The prints will be signed but un-numbered as they will not be from my limited edition series of which there are only a few now.

You can either view the images I have on various sites and select one or if you wish, I will ask if you have any preferences and select sample images for your review.

Back to Sun, Earth and Moon Composite



In the fields I saw these flowers in several stages of opening to the full flower and one particular set reminded me of the planets with the Sun Earth and its Moon. I decided to take an image of each flower against a black backdrop and combine them as a composite.

I tried to do a similar image with the original flowers in situ but because of their short stature (8 inches high) and their various lengths of growth I was not successful in sufficiently blurring the grass and having all flower tops crisp and in focus. The image below shows these plants as found.


With this tripod setup I did take an image with each flower in focus and then another set progressively blurring the grass below. I thought I might be able to create a semi-real image with sharp flowers and blurred grass but when working on the images I soon realized just how much work it would be to finalize an image. The main problem was trying to blend in the different stalk DOF blurs into a realistic image.

Even the black background version took 2 hours with a Photoshop file of 250Mb and containing 16 layers.

I have a drop cloth that I use while painting and I tried a few with this as the background instead of the black as shown below.


While there is interesting texture I don’t think it was going to work as well in a 3-image composite. As I am accumulating more and more paint on this drop cloth I realize that this will form a very interesting abstract background that I can use for photography.

If you know a professional painter, you may buy him or her a drop cloth to use and wait a few months to collect your new background photographic cloth.

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Niels Henriksen