I've not posted much recently but have been playing with textrues... with what I think is a great result.
I'm thinking about having this printed out onto a canvas to grace our hallway.
A little part of the web for me to talk about Photography, what I'm up to, share experiments, recent shots, hints and tips. To share my (limited) experience with others and to gain further skills myself.
Showing posts with label flower. Show all posts
Showing posts with label flower. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
With Spring rapidly springing all around there are a wealth of Photographic Opportunities. This little flower is a Grape Hyacinth from my garden, they're really cheery little flowers. I picked it, put it in a small glass, repositioned it to a shady spot out of the direct sun and made sure I had a nice uniform background. The background was a holly bush in the direct sun and the light glinting off the leaves has given the circular "bokeh" effect. To acheive a similar effect use a lens with a "long" focal length (say>50mm). Shoot in aperture priority mode with a wide aperture f/5.6 - f/2.8 or even f/1.8 if you have a lens that'll open that wide. Finally ensure that the camera - subject distance is << than subject to background distance. Having a background that has very bright specular highlights will give the best bokeh. The light in the shaded area was still sufficient to hand hold the shot without resorting to a tripod but if your shutter speed starts to drop below 1/focal lenth then think about using a tripod or resting your camera on a solid surface to avoid shake.
In terms of post processing. This was done entirely in Lightroom 2 as part of the raw conversion. I boosted the colours slightly with Vibrance and an increase in the blacks. Clarity was increased and then some further sharpening. I played with the tone curve to increase the highlights and lights and decrease the shadows and darks to give a further contrast boost. Exported to my flickr stream using Jeffry Friedl's excellent lightroom plug in (Jeffrey Friedl's Blog » Jeffrey’s Lightroom Goodies (Plugins and Tools)) and also using the LR2 Mogrify plug in from Timothy Armes to provide the borders and signature direct from ligthroom on export. Photographer's toolbox - Best Plugins and Web Engines for Adobe Lightroom
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