Sojourns

Late summer

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Trilogy

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Fragile

Considering the image:  A quick photograph of some landscaping flowers at my house.

Making the photograph:  I made a single exposure tonight.  The EF 50mm f/1.8 was still on the camera so that’s what I used.  I desaturated a bit in post to leave a bit of detail in the flower petals.

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"Snakeberries!"

One of our son’s young friends pointed to this plant and sang out, “Snakeberries!”  This is not the snakeberry flower that I’m familiar with.  But I don’t know what it is, so I’ll let it stand for now.  It made a nice composition against the shorter yellow flowers at its feet.  I shot this with the “Nifty-Fifty” at 1/250, f2.0 and just a hint of flash from a 1/4 CTO gelled 430EX.  The bit of light helped the red flower pop against the blue-ish shade of late afternoon.

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Wishers

We took a family walk tonight and ran across this field of dandelions ready to seed.  My son ran into the field and started blowing the seeds into the wind.  After a moment he yelled back “C’mon guys!  Wishers!”  So of course we had to join him.  When asked what he wished for, Ben replied “Big Trucks!”, as if duh, we should have known that!  Priceless.

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Azalea Blossom

The azaleas are in full bloom here in Charleston.  I always have a hard time shooting these flowers because I think they look best when viewed in their rows and formations in the landscapes rather than as here in a single blossom.  But I have yet to find a pleasing composition with more than one flower in the frame.  This was one of the less common white species among all the pinks, magentas and reds.  I knew that if I could isolate a single bloom that I could get an image like this.

In post process I punched up the microcontrast a bit with a high pass filter layer.  Then a standard linear contrast curve layer and a bit of brightness/contrast in a layer.  For the black and white conversion I chose the CS3 preset of “maximum black”.  Three sharpening passes included a high-pass filter sharpen and unsharp mask before cropping and toning.  After sizing, the third sharpening pass was for web presentation.

I like this image and I’ll definitely be printing it for my own house, if not for sale.

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Fuschia

These landscape plants always catch my eye wherever they are used.  I don’t know whether I like them or not, but the color is just crazy saturated.

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Time

Today has been a slow day.  I’ve spent most of it cleaning up my Aperture library and beginning the long task of scanning the thousands of old slides and negatives in my storage.  Photoshop crashed as well and I had to reload the entire CS3 suite.

After all that I had a moment to head out to find something for today’s subject.  But the day is grey, wet and uninspiring.  What to do?  Grab a flower, one of our hand-made Swedish shot glasses, a couple of strobes, and go to town.

It brightened my day, anyway…

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Complements

What do I think about on cold, rainy, winter days?  Springtime, of course!  I long for sunny, warm days when I can get back out on my bike and ride for hours.  With that in mind it didn’t take long to settle on a subject for the day.

This was an easy shoot.  One strobe into a Photek Softlighter II from front, camera left and one strobe gelled deep blue against the white seamless background.  I grabbed the EF 28-105mm zoom because of its close focusing abilities to allow a nice, tight composition.  Set everything to manual, dial in the strobe ratio and EV and click off a few frames.  Then just some light post-processing with curves, sharpening, and crop to 8×10 format to produce the photo you see here.  I spent less than 20 minutes from concept to dropping the photo on this blog entry.