One-Four Challenge: Forager Duck, Part I

After a break of many months from the One Four Challenge that Robyn hosts on her blog, I’m participating again this month. And the picture I choose is that of a duck looking for food on the shores of Lake Tahoe. I call it ‘Forager Duck’ because it sounds like ‘Ranger Duck’ and makes the duck look tough.

I had to do some pre-editing on the original photograph to make it eligible for more editing, and this pre-edited version is what I’ll use as the base image for this time’s edits. I’ll publish that at the end of this month, as always. I’m planning on keeping this month’s images soft and light; I hope that’ll eventually turn out to be true. (The pre-edit is neither soft nor light, so yeah, it’ll take some work.)

For this week’s edit, I duplicated the original (by which I mean pre-edited) image layer in Hard Light mode, and applied a Gaussian Blur of 15. I then duplicated the blurred layer in Screen mode. I finally added a vignette. That adds some simple softening and a bit of glow, and hides the frothiness of those waves.

If you want to look for more submissions, they’re on Robyn’s blog. Or you could search for the tag ‘One Four Challenge’ on WordPress.