So for the last photography assignment, we were asked to photograph light painting, star trails, or this bizarre technique called "flower power." I, of course, was completely thrilled and excited to shoot star trails. I haven't ever done any night photography previously and I figured this was a great time to learn, after all, it's not really that difficult.

Of course, unless you take the stars out of play and insert clouds.

It was wicked overcast the entire weekend, which meant that I was out of luck.

Due to this unfortunate event, I decided to switch my project from star trails to "flower power." The whole "flower power" concept was highly unappealing to me. The idea is to focus on a flower/flowering bush/brightly colored tree and hold the shutter down whilst moving my camera all over the place in every direction. It basically looks like flower vomit. My professor required a minimum of eight shots per flower, but I did more like fifteen to thirty, just for fun. Bring the photographs into Lightroom, then export them as layers into Photoshop (which took a very long time, since I was dealing with DNG files). Select all the layers, set the blending mode to "Lighten," and voilà! Flower vomit!

The day before the assignment was due, I photographed a large variety of Home Depot's flowers in their nursery. After I finished layering all the pictures in Photoshop, I realized that this was kind of a cool technique. I ended up really liking my results, though this isn't really my style.

If I were to do this assignment over, I would avoid shooting flowers with a large amount of white on them, or at least shoot less photos of them, so the buildup isn't as strong. Many of the pictures could have been really neat, except they were too washed out.