Taken in the Japanese Garden in Portland Oregon's amazing Washington Park on 14 July 2008.
An amazing flower to begin with, even past it's prime.
This image presented a fairly interesting set of technical challenges. Shooting handheld with the Canon G9, getting the shot was reasonably entertaining. Since the light was mostly high and flat, creating an image that brought out the right contrast for the leaves took some work. I'm still trying to get the G9 to do what I visualize but it's coming along slowly. The resolution on the little beast is just amazing though.
Photoshop CS3 processing went along the usual lines: separate layers for levels, curves, and then the new CS3 b/w conversion layer. This was followed by some significant foolling around with toning, some burning and dodging and a final, gentle sharpening followed by conversion to jpeg.
The Messy Details:
Levels were corrected in the usual way to expand the dynamic range; I also tweaked the alpha up a bit higher to lighten the whole thing.
The color curve on this image was somewhat unique; since the histogram had a decided broad U shape, I made the curve echo this slightly, with a decrease corresponding to the trough of the U in the histogram.
The toning was more involved than usual as well. I usually stick with a straight and fairly subtle Platinum toning on nearly everything but lately I've been adding a little Silver to the mix as well to create some brighter whites. Today at an art festival I saw some work by Emanuel Volakis who prints his big landscape images with Silver gelatin and then gently tones with Selenium. As a result I futzed around for a bit with Platinum, Paladium, Silver Gelatin and Selenium, finally settling on an Ag Gelatin-Platinum toning for this image.
I'm fairly happy with this image. Retaining the yellow in the falls of the Iris was a bit challenging - most b/w conversion methods either lose that completely or don't give it enough contrast with the surrounding intense white. The toning experiment worked out well and I will likely be using this combination in the future as well.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Friday, July 04, 2008
Taken at the Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island, Washington on 27 June 2008.
I'm finding some very interesting floral images using backlighting to highlight the texture and form. This image is perhaps the strongest use yet of that technique.
When this shot was taken it was mid afternoon and so the light was very strong and quite harsh overall but here it worked really well to show the thickness of the petals and the reflected texture on the leaf.
From a technical point of view the highlights are blown out in this image but the strong light was necessary to get the veins on the right leaf to show up.
I did a fair amount of manipulation with Photoshop on this image - but primarily just to balance the colors during the black and white conversion and the usual toning (Platinum - Silver), burning and dodging.
I'm finding some very interesting floral images using backlighting to highlight the texture and form. This image is perhaps the strongest use yet of that technique.
When this shot was taken it was mid afternoon and so the light was very strong and quite harsh overall but here it worked really well to show the thickness of the petals and the reflected texture on the leaf.
From a technical point of view the highlights are blown out in this image but the strong light was necessary to get the veins on the right leaf to show up.
I did a fair amount of manipulation with Photoshop on this image - but primarily just to balance the colors during the black and white conversion and the usual toning (Platinum - Silver), burning and dodging.
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