Abstract Thursday: Psychedelia

Today's Abstract Thursday challenge (hosted by the ever-faithful Ingeborg) has an open theme, so I thought I'd play with a technique I learned a couple of weeks ago at John Gravett's Creative Workshop at Lakeland Photographic. It involves putting droplets of water on a CD and then waving a torch around during a longish exposure. Interference effects produce the colours and refraction in the droplets magnifies part of the image.

I'm sure I remember John blipping the results of this technique some time back, so I decided to vary mine by adding another technique John showed us - how to use the Polar Coordinates distortion filter in Photoshop to best effect.

The brown streaks near the centre come from the grain in the oak table on which the CD was placed.

I guess this sort of abstract would have been well suited to the psychedelic era of the late 1960s (not that I would know, not having dabbled in the LSD scene myself!).

It's great fun and yet quite quick to do - I'm sure similar effects will feature again in my journal before long.