Posts in Category: flowers
7/20/2009
Primrose's On My Mind
I like Primrose, but then I don’t think I had ever seen primrose on this scale, or exactly this color. Breathtaking might be too strong, but certainly something like a hiccup. Again when the subject is really the mass effect, you have to shop for a pattern that catches the eye. Zooming out to about 200mm and shooting at a low angle into the mass of flowers captured the effect I was after. (We are, by the way, still at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay, ME.)
Sony DSC H50 at about 200mm equivalent. F5.6 @ 1/800 @ ISO 100. Programed auto.
I used the General-Punch develop preset in Lightroom and the Sharpen-landscapes preset. That is all. Did not even open the image in the develop module.
Here is a more traditional view from a higher angle, with a longer zoom (350mm equivalent) and from further away. Greater compression here.
Primrose Sea
Same presets in Lightroom. A similar effect…but different.
7/19/2009
Massed Coreopsis
For me, sometimes it is not so much about a subject so much as it is about the mass of color and form. Color and form and the play of light become the subject, and rather than looking at the image as an image of something, the image becomes the something. Do you know what I mean?
This shot is that kind of shot. No center, no subject, no where for the eye to rest…unless you step back and just see the whole thing at once. It would do well as print on the wall where it could become the object of interest in and of itself. I think.
To take it I used about mid-zoom, the short end of the long tel range on the H50, to frame this particular segment of the mass of flowers, and to flatten perspective. I spent a few second framing and reframing until I found the most pleasing pattern.
Sony DCS H50 zoomed in to about 250mm equivalent. F4.5 @ 1/250th @ ISO 100. Programed auto.
Just the most basic added Vibrance and Clarity and shapen in Lightroom.
From Coastal Maine Botanical Garden.
And here is a single flower from the mass.
Portrait of Coreopsis
7/18/2009
Happy Harvester
Of course the happy part is pure anthropomorphism. Can bees be happy? I certainly don’t know, but the sight of one busy in a flower makes me happy, once I get by my diffuse fear of stinging insects.
It was a brilliant day at the Coastal Botanical Gardens in Boothbay Maine, and the high sun cast strong shadows, but picked out all the subtle detail in both petals and bee. One of the advantages of the articulated LDC on the H50 is that I can hold the camera one-handed, well away from me, out over a bed of flowers, for this kind of close in and personal shot.
Sony DSC H50 at full wide and macro. F5.6 @ 1/400th @ ISO 100. Programed auto.
Just my basic added Vibrance and Clarity and Landscape sharpen preset in Lightroom. There was a bit of purple fringing along the bottom petal edge which I also removed in Lightroom.
From Coastal Maine Botanical Garden.
And a second bee in flower from the same day…this time in open shade.
Happy Harvester 2
7/16/2009
Maine Uber Chic
I got several comments on the digital photo groups to the effect that yesterday’s image was too busy and lacked a center of interest. Valid observation. What I see in the image is the riot of color and form, which I see as a subject in itself, but I know what the commenters are objecting too.
Short of physically going back and reshooting, this time maybe taking someone with me to stand in front of the roses, I wondered if overemphasizing the form and color aspect of the shot would improve it. I generally do not do this kind of manipulation, as I like my images to be an accurate reflection of what someone might see if confronted with the same scene, but there is room for pushing the limits of the process to make a point, or to create a vision that captures what you saw in the image, rather than the reality itself. This is, of course, what the whole To Blur or Not to Blur piece was about over on Point and Shoot Landscape.
So, in Lightroom I took the original image and applied a technique I have experimented with before on this kind of image. I slid the Clarity slider all the way to the left, applying what amounts to negative clarity. Because Clarity is essentially a local contrast enhancement, this is not the same as applying, for instance, a blur in photoshop. Negative Clarity produces a kind of soft glow. I then increased Saturation significantly, and boosted Contrast slightly. This all required a bit of added Brightness. Finally, I cropped the image more tightly to place the stair diagonal in a more powerful position in the frame.
The image now is certainly nothing you would see in reality (unless you where operating under the influence…some influence of some kind). Maybe it works better though to convey what I was seeing when I took the image. Maybe.
What do you think?
7/15/2009
Maine Chic
A restaurant on the pier at Cape Porpoise Harbor. What can I say? The riot of color and shape, the contrast of the rose plant and the railing full of lobster floats, the red boat…had to be done.
It was a somewhat tricky exposure and required some post processing for good tonal balance, but other than that…I just zoomed in for framing and shot.
DSC H50 at about 66mm equivalent. F4.0 @ 1/320 @ ISO 100. Programed auto, -.3EV exposure compensation.
Cropped slightly in Lightroom, from the right to eliminate some highly reflective and distracting windows. Heavy Recovery for the rose blossoms, Fill Light to open the shadows. Slight contrast increase, added Clarity and Vibrance, and Landscape sharpen preset. There was slight chromatic aberration (color fringing) showing on the left and right, so I used the CA filter in Lightroom to remove it.
7/7/2009
And White Campion for my Banner!
This is another shot that is easy to visualize and difficult to do. I tried several times, with the Campion which was standing tallest and with the Vetch which was equally dramatic. This is what I was after.
Take a good long look at the image, because what I am about to tell you will change your perception of it, and I want your original impression well fixed.
Tell-tale shadow
Only when I got it all processed and uploaded to Wide Eyed In Wonder (my smugmug site) did I notice that there was a dark shadow across the lower petals. I had hopefully attributed it to the petals being folder under in processing, but now that I looked closely I saw it for what it was…the shadow of my lens.
Unacceptable. I can stand natural obstructions, and often leave them in when others might edit them out, but I do not want something that I put there to spoil the image.
I tried some Local Adjustment brush work in Lightroom, but the petals have a texture that was destroyed by adjustments in brightness or exposure. The only option to save the image (imho) was to take it into Photoshop Elements for some work with the clone tool. It is rare that I have to resort to anything beyond the tools available in Lightroom, but this was the exception. The clone tool allows you to pick up a piece of the image…color, texture…the whole thing…and paint it over another section of the image. It is the way you magically remove those protruding branches, bits of grass in front of faces, etc. In this case all I wanted to do was remove the shadow. To do that I selected the petal right above the shadow, and carefully painted its texture and exposure over the darkened areas. This works so well that on the left petal, I was able to paint in a water droplet at the tip of the petal.
Is this cheating? I don’t have a good answer for that. Certainly I would have preferred not to have gotten the shadow in there in the first place, but given the tools at our disposal today, I saw no reason to leave it there and let it spoil a shot that I really liked.
Sony DSC H50 at full wide and macro. F5.6 @ 1/250th @ ISO 100. Programed Auto.
Besides the processing outlined above, in Lightroom I cropped slightly from the right to eliminate a distraction and improve composition. Recovery for the sky. Added Clarity and Vibrance and Landscape sharpen. I was able to retain all those edits when exporting the file to Photoshop Elements, so the find version includes those changes and the editing I did in PE.
7/6/2009
High-tide in the Tidal marsh, With flowers.
The first sunny Saturday morning, after 2 weeks of steady rain, found me down at the beach before my shower. Pics to be taken.
I tried several variations of this shot, with the wildflowers blooming up out of the sea-rose hedges and clumps in the foreground, and various backgrounds. This is the tidal-marsh on a little tributary of the Mousam River which apparently has no name (not that I can find on maps anyway). The stream drains freshwater wetlands just back from the coast, across Rt. 9.
Lots for the eye to play with in this image, from the flowers in the foreground, to the lone grass head breaking the horizon, to the folded marsh covered in a pelt of grasses, to the intense blue of the tidal pond, to the tall centered stand of pines, to the clouds painting the blue of the sky. Almost too much, but, for me, the tall clump of pines anchors it enough to give the eye some ease and let it all hang together. I would prefer to have the clump of trees on one of the power lines (rule of thirds lines), but no crop with the trees there is successful, and they would not move for me.
You might want to click on the image to view it larger. What fits in the blog-space does not do it full justice.
Sony DSC H50 at full wide. F8.0 @ 1/200th @ ISO 100. Programed auto with program shift for the smaller aperture and greater depth of field.
In Lightroom, Recovery for the sky and clouds. Blackpoint slightly to the right. Added Vibrance and Clarity, and Landscape sharpen preset. This is a candidate for dual graduated filter effects, top and bottom, but it does not, considering the brilliance of the light, really need it. Cropped slightly from the bottom for composition.
7/5/2009
Who Knew? Green Bee on Blanket Flower
Who knew? There are green bees! Tiny. Very strange. Maybe even the original of the Green Hornet (though, outside comics, there is not such actual insect.) It took me an hour of searching to find a name for this critter on the internet…or rather to confirm the name that popped immediately to mind. Green bee. Genius Agapostemon. Appears there are many species and I am not certain which this is, but it is without doubt, a green bee…tiny and jewel like in its metalic splendor, posed on this Blanket Flower, right in our front yard.
Sony DSC H50 at full wide and macro. F3.2 @ 1/60th @ ISO 100. Programed auto.
In Lightroom, just a slight crop from the right for composition, added Clarity and Vibrance, and Landscape sharpen preset.
And here without the bee, an even closer view of the Blanket Flower.
Extreme Blanket Flower
7/4/2009
Pink Pogonia Orchid
Happy 4th of July!
On the way back from my Fernald Brook adventure, I ran into an area where the road I had to walk was completely under water…not much water…a few inches. It was an old road that, near as I could tell, skirts the edge of a disused gravel pit, now turned into a kind of sumpy wetland. Not exactly where you would go to search for an increasingly rare orchid in Maine. But there it was, a patch of well over a hundred fragile plants, all in bloom.
Sony DSC H50 at full wide and macro. F5.6 @ 1/500th @ ISO 100. Programed auto.
Cropped slightly in Lightroom for composition. Recovery for the highlights. Added Clarity and Vibrance. Blackpoint to the right. Landscape sharpen preset. I also used the Local Adjustment Brush to paint a mask over the background and then decreased Clarity and Sharpness to the max, and Contrast slightly, to give the effect of a shallower depth of field. One of the issues with small Point and Shoots on macro is that the physical size of the aperture gives greater depth of field than the corresponding lens on a DSLR, which makes it harder to separate the subject from a potentially distracting background. LAB in Lightroom to the rescue.
And, for contrast, just a few yards away where the moss was taking over I found a whole cluster of these Sweet White Violets blooming the gloom of the overhanging trees and bank very late in the season.
Sweet White Violet
F3.5 @ 1/60th @ ISO 100 in the more subdued light.
6/28/2009
Infinate Cadillac
Happy Sunday!
This is perhaps an appropriate shot for the last entry from this year’s trip to Acadia. I tried several before getting this low angle, flower and lichen in the foreground, expanse of the rocky top and ziz zag of the environmental fencing, and then leaping out across Frenchman’s bay to the horizon with its clouds. I was trying to capture at least one aspect of Cadillac and Acadia: the sense of being suspended, all life, from the flower struggling against odds to the humans tiny on the near horizon, between the rocky, gritty particular and an awesome infinity. For me, that is an essential element of the Acadia experience.
Practically speaking, I used Program Shift (see In Praise of Program Shift on Point and Shoot Landscape) to get the smallest aperture for greatest depth of field to keep everything from the foreground rock detail and the flower petals to the far horizon relatively sharp. It took me quite a few shots and 20 minutes to find the right flower. F8 on a P&S is pretty deep focus, but I found that I had to put the flower up into the field a bit and let some of the rock go soft right at the bottom of the frame. I cropped out the out of focus area in Lightroom during post processing.
Sony DSC H50 at full wide and macro. F8.0 @ 1/200th @ ISO 100. Programed auto, program shifted for smallest aperture.
In Lightroom, besides the crop, Recovery for the sky, some Fill Light and added Contrast to compensate in the foreground, added Clarity and Vibrance, and Landscape sharpen preset.