Crocus Impression

Interesting story. I took some shots of these newly opened Crocus for a test of two compact HD video cameras I did for P&S Landscape (here) and posted them to Flickr for convenience in placing them in my blog. On Flickr they immediately began to draw comments. So I had to go out, end of the day, with my real camera and take some shots. Clearly.

In pushing for greatest depth of field, I used Program Shift to move the auto exposure to smallest possible aperture, and ended up with some pretty slow shutter speeds. Anyway, I took some really close ups of the insides of the flowers, as in leading petals touching the lens. They did not work for me as straight on photographs so I tried some Lightroom magic to enhance the strangeness of them. I will reshoot some this morning without touching the Program Shift and see what I get. In the meantime, this slightly unreal, manipulated image stands on its own as what it is: an impression of Crocus.

Sony DSC H50 at full wide (31mm equivalent). F5.0 @ 1/30th @ ISO 100. Program Shifted for smallest aperture.

In Lightroom, some Recovery, and more than usual amounts of Clarity and especially Vibrance to push the look over the edge of reality. Landscape sharpen preset. But then I went in with the color selective HSL (hue, saturation, and luminance) controls and altered the luminance of specific colors. In Lightroom you have a color selection tool that you can place over the image. Clicking the mouse and dragging up or down over a specific color in the image changes the HSL (whichever you have set, luminance in this case) values on the fly, as you watch. Lightroom does all the calculations and changes whatever color bands it needs, multiple bands most generally, to change just the color that was under your tool when you clicked the mouse. It is magical. By selecting the orange of the stamens and sliding the mouse up, I brightened just that orange, making the stamens pop out of the image. Then I selected the purple of the petal veins and slid the mouse down to darken that color and increase the contrast between it and the rest of the petals. The result is a striking, if somewhat unreal, image.

From Around Home.

Here is a more straight on image of the same flowers.

A bit more real...but better?