Poi Flowers

I took this picture of my friend Christian spinning fire poi and decided to make it a little more abstract.

He's doing a move called "flowers," where the rotation of your hands and the poi is in the opposite direction or antispin to the direction of the revolution of your arms, giving it the appearance of the petals of a flower. This is a fairly advanced move and difficult to execute well.

I had to leave the shutter of the camera open for a few seconds to capture the trails of the poi and then pop a single flash to paint one frame of his body to the picture. This must of course be done in total darkness or leaving the shutter open would flood the sensor with light and overexpose the image completely.

After capturing a good image of Christian and the poi in motion, I decided to play on the theme of flowers and bring in a large image of a flower into a separate layer in Photoshop and begin to distort the image as a whole. I inverted the colors of the flower layer and liked how the orange parts of both layers resonated and made it a more interesting compostion.

As a last touch I used a pattern stamp tool to clone maple leaf shapes throughout the image, just to give it a little more texture.

Hope you like it, comments appreciated! :)

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(Entry for contest https://steemit.com/art/@juliakponsford/art-explosion-week-14-theme-distortions-25-sbd-in-prizes-all-forms-of-art-welcome)