Instead of a zoom right around the end of the 2.5 sec exposure I rotated the camera on the tripod to the left, after cropping out the shaft of Seattle's Space needle I titled the image and cropped to get rid of the outlying corners and added a little magic of my own.
Owls have been a big fascination for me and I like to include them when creating illustrations. This took me about 2 days to create. I use felt markers, water colors and sometimes photoshop.
I honestly felt the graduated filter ditched a lot of nice info, so I thought I would give it a crack and try to get it back. I really was drawn to the very dramatic stormy sky so I preserved it by creating a mask, I contracted the selection back by 2 pixels and then applied a feather of 2 pixels so that any work done close to the sky would be unnoticable. I then created a nice sizable dodge tool about 1/8th the size of the overall image lighting up areas I thought could use a little more brightening in the middle section of the image on the midtones. I also darkened a few spots on the forground rock to give a nice balanced lighting. Last was to lighten up the rock cliff on the right, I did this with my dodge tool where I focused mainly on the midtones, had I used highlights I would have blown out areas that had important definition. Time to complete, about a half hour.
This ice formation was caused by the cold water freezing as the tires spun around, eventually building up to create this ice flower design on our tires. Isn't that pretty cool!
![Gold Star Critiquer/Silver Workshop Editor/Gold Note Writer [C: 1035 W: 10 N: 2322]](http://i1.treknature.com/misc/g-s-g.gif){kind=small}
![Gold Star Critiquer/Gold Star Workshop Editor/Gold Note Writer [C: 2134 W: 224 N: 3948]](http://i1.treknature.com/misc/g-g-g.gif){kind=small}
