This challenge certainly took me outside of my comfort zone, and challenged me in many ways. Pretty much form the start I knew I wanted to go for something with good blur, but getting good blur is very difficult without a ND filter. Stopping down the aperture can help lengthen the shutter time, but that also results in a larger depth of field. I have a polarizing filter for my 15-85 lens, but that only happens so much. So I had to use more physics knowledge and make sure the background was very far from the subject in comparison to the lens to subject distance (to use the small aperture). In this case the lens was about 2m from the subject and the background was at least 15 m away.
I got lucky and went to shoot for this on a windy day. That allowed me to hold the shutter and get a number of shots and pick out the best movement. Far and away this shot was the best. The plant must have stopped at the left most position for an extended period of time to make this effect.
Post Processing:
* Crop
* Retouch out dust spots
* Increase exposure
* Increase black point
* Topaz DeNoise
* Nik HDR Efex Pro on a single exposure
* White Balance
* Increase Exposure and recovery
* Increase contrast and definition
* Reduce Saturation but increase Vibrancy
* Reduce Green but increase red/purple/blue
* Export as TIFF
* Resize
* Sharpen Edges
* Save as JPEG
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