Morning Blur

Before


After

It's amazing what you can do with common (especially free) photo editing tools like The Gimp.

The morning sunlight on my neighbor's tree caught my eye as I was coming back from a walk today. In the few seconds it took me to go inside, grab my camera and change lenses, it had already left the tree I saw it on. However, instead it appeared on this larger one.

I didn't like the sharpness of the rather unattractive house in the background, so I applied a 160 px Gaussian blur to the background in The Gimp and then feathered it at 20 px. The tree however, is untouched except that I changed the color temperature from 5,000 to 6,422 as a last step for the overall image.

I suppose I could have achieved the same effect naturally with a different aperture. That didn't occur to me until I started writing this, though. And the light was gone.

You can also see my post of this photo on Flickr.