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Playing with flowers

OK, I promise that I’ll get back to some good old fashioned bugs soon, but I thought I would post some more flowers.  Last weekend at the Bellevue Botanical Gardens I played around with daisies.  I took all of these shots with my 180L but without a tripod.  Instead I used my MT-24EX mounted on a Wimberley macro flash bracket.  I would like to say that a great deal of creative thought went into this decision - but the truth is I was too lazy to get the tripod out and spend a lot of time getting the position right.

The following is an experiment I did with a different daisy shot in Photoshop.  Here’s the original shot with no post processing.

I strengthened the shadows on it, upped the contrast, and did some light leveling to get this shot.

I think I like the second take a bit better, though I’m not sure if it is too simple.  Ironically this would probably make a good stock picture, though it would likely be rejected because the microstock sites have far too many daisy shots already.  I think Iike the concept of the white daisy on a dark background, but I’m not sure I think it is executed best in this shot.  Perhaps I have some daisies in my garden that my poor gardening skills haven’t killed yet and I can play around with this a bit more.

Related posts:

1. Experimenting with Photoshop and flowers Recently I have started listening to the photo critiques at RadiantVista.  For those of you not familiar with this site, it is an excellent source of information and composition and Photoshop and on top of that it is free.  Currently my use of Photoshop is limited to changing contrast/shadows...
2. Playing with bugs on flowers This weekend I finally found the chance to get out and take some pictures, as Saturday was a very nice day.  I wandered around in my backyard for awhile, looking in the normal places, and found nothing that I hadn’t photographed several times already.  The shoot was briefly interrupted as...
3. Trying my hand at flowers While taking pictures of insects yesterday at the Bellevue Botanical Gardens, I noticed that they had lots of pretty things on the plants that sometimes the bugs would crawl on.  As most of you know, I spend most of my macro efforts taking pictures of insects, but the major reason...
4. Harvestman portrait Today while looking through some of my recent pictures I came across this portrait I took of a harvestman. I spent not too much time improving this shot from the original.  Mainly, I just strengthened the shadows, increased the contrast, removed some dust spots and used the burn tool around...
5. Introduction to Microstock Photography - Microstock Strategies In this post I’ll mention a hodgepodge of strategies that I have found useful for microstock photography.  Keywords are extremely important.  I typically spend more time getting the keywords right than I do post processing the image.  Always make sure you get these right - because they’ll strongly affect whether...

Tags: daisy, flower, macro, photography