Winds of Autumn

We're having a lot of wind here, both last night and today. I went out this morning and took a few photos including this one  looking across the meadow toward our small piece of woods. In just the couple of hours since shooting the original image the wind has knocked about half the leaves off the yellow/orange tree that is left of center.

It is a bit hard to tell in the small version here, even if you click on it to see it full size, but I have digitally modified it in both Photoshop and PostWorkShop. I used  the Topaz Simply filter in Photoshop to reduce detail and then layered over that  a version that I had modified in PostWorkShop with both watercolor and drawing layers. The full effect is visible on the large file which would print out at least 10"x15" but in reducing the image size for web use much of the effect is lost. To give an idea a cropped detail is below.

I find that when doing a lot of these special effects they only work well when reproduced at the size that the effect was originally applied to. If you shrink or stretch the size the effect loses its visual impact. I like this combination though. The overall visual effect matches what I visualized when I was shooting the photo.

Canon 7d with an 18-135mm EFs lens on a monopod.