Cellpic Sunday – Pep Ventosa Style

Flowering Crabapple.

Fargo, North Dakota.

Spring has finally arrived and the two flowering crabapple trees in our condo yard are in full bloom. Of course, I had to photograph the better of the two. By the time you read this, the blossoms will be long gone as I’ve scheduled this post to publish in early July. I couldn’t just take an “ordinary” photo, though. I had to experiment with a style I learned about while researching photography videos on YouTube.

I discovered a YouTube channel titled “Creative Photography with Lori Lankford“. This link to her site features one of her videos, a tutorial on how to emulate images made famous by an artist-photographer named Pep Ventosa. Mr. Ventosa has a fascinating way of photographing trees and converting them into impressionistic art.

“Pep Ventosa’s tree portraits are composed of multiple photographs, shot as he circles the subject. Catalonia-born Ventosa photographs trees in cities around the world, then superimposes the different views to produce images that read like paintings.”  — Garden Design Magazine

From Mr. Ventosa’s website page on trees here.

If you click on the link above, you’ll see a gallery of Mr. Ventosa’s work featuring examples of his tree photographs. From there, you can judge whether or not I was successful in emulating his style. I will leave it to you, dear reader, to watch the video if you are interested in creating your own experiments. The description below is but a thumbnail of how I created the final image.

About the photo: The first step is to walk around the tree and capture several images from different viewpoints. Ideally, there should be images captured every few steps all the way around the tree. Unfortunately, since this tree is on a corner of our lot, I had to settle for approximately 120 degrees or so around the circle. I used my Samsung S23U and started on the east side of the tree and snapped my first image. I then moved about eight steps to the left while attempting to keep the camera at the same height above the ground (yes, I could have used a tripod.) At the end of each eight-step block, I captured another image, ten images in all ending up southwest of the tree.

My usual processing flow is from Lightroom to Luminar Neo, however, since I would be creating the image using Neo’s layering tools, I reversed my flow and imported all ten of the images into Neo first. I then opened a single image and added the other nine images as layers. Though the video describes the process when using Photoshop, it’s basically the same as layering in Neo. Each layer was overlaid at about 20 percent opacity and I manually aligned each layer using the tree’s trunk to move the layer until it was directly over the trunk in the layer below. I experimented with blend modes and ended up using the Screen mode to blend each layer into the whole.

Once the layers were blended, I exported the image to a single JPG file for final processing. It’s there that I masked off the tree and used the Mystical, Structure, and Film Grain tools to de-emphasize the background. I was almost done, so when I exported it as a final image, I brought it into Lightroom to catalog it there. At that point, I realized that the blossoms were too red for my liking. I used Lightroom’s HSL tint and luminance controls to brighten the flowers and bring them back to the pink colors that were in the original images.

Click on the image above to pixel peep in 2K HD via my Flickr site, and I’d love to read your thoughts in the comments as to whether or not you’ve ever tried to do any image style emulations. It does seem to be a “thing” on YouTube. You may have already seen my attempt at creating the Adamski effect in a digression last month. Also, feel free to let me know if you like reading about my experiments in emulation and I’ll try to do more. On the other hand, let me know if you think that I should stick to travel posts.

I encourage fellow bloggers to create their own Cellpic Sunday posts. I never have a specific topic for this feature, and the only rules are that the photo must be captured with a cell phone, iPad, or another mobile device… If you have an image from a drone or even a dashcam, that’s acceptable as well. The second rule is to link your challenge response to this post or leave a comment here with a link to your post in the comment. Oh, and, you don’t have to post it on a Sunday.

John Steiner