This is a reworked image from the archives. Originally take on April 14, 2007 at the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate State Park, San Francisco, California.
The flower was a sort of pinkish coral orange (to my eyes) on a fairly dark green leafy background. My origiinal visualization of the black and white version of this image was to highlight the curl of the petal as well as the diamond mesh texture on the rather extravagant corkscrew by giving them an isolation and careful enhancement of the tonal values in the mids and upper highlights.
As far as processing goes, I began by increasing the vibrance of the raw image before jumping into Photoshop. Next I cropped the image down from the much larger initial photo to set up the composition and concentrate attention on the flower itself. After relatively standard application of Levels and Curves, I used Nik Silver Effects to do the black and white conversion. Within the Nik AgEfx package, I used a very mild pale blue filter to give a bit more contrast to the image, and an Ilford ISO 50 black and white film profile to get a good contrasty tonal range. I also decreased the grain size a bit to keep it from interfering with with fine texture on the cork screw.
After exiting Nik, I applied another Level layer, using my now standard Threshold layer technique to find and set up final light and dark endpoints on the Level histogram. Even still, the lightest part of the petal texture was a bit blown out by about a quarter or third stop, so I selected just that area using the color range selector and then a downward bowed Curve layer to bring down the brightness for those areas just a bit.
Next came burning and dodging to darken a few of the brighter specular leaf highlights in the background and to put a bit of a vignette around the main body of the flower. Instead of the default Photoshop burn and dodge tools, I use the rather more controllable method of overlaying the image with a new layer blended with soft light, and filled with the 50% neutral tone. Then using pure black and white as the foreground and background, (switching as required), and using a soft edged, nearly transparent paintbrush, one can darken or lighten in a gentle, slow, and very controllabe manner.
I'm pretty happy with this image - it's eye catching and the contrast between the rather hard curves of the cork screw and the soft roll of the petal are well differentiated. The goal of showing off the texture difference was fairly straight-forward to achieve though processing, though this didn't occur until the sharpening step. I had hoped to be able to highlight the little white pollen grains on the end of the corkscrew and that too turned out to be relatively easy to do just by watching the levels endpoints in the final levels layer. The bokeh also turned out quite well too.
The only thing I'm mildly chapped about in this image is that depth of field is not quite perfect. Shooting at f3.2, the back of the corkscrew is a little bit out of focus; an f-stop of 3.6 or 4.0 might have been better to get it all in perfect focus yet still isolated from the background.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Tulips (Detail)
A rather fun shot of some yellow tulips.
This particular image is a crop from a larger image shot. The lighting is all natural and provided by the sun bouncing off of snow (yes snow in in Issaquah mid March!) to provide uplights off the ground and off of snow covered trees in the background to profide back lighting.
I like this image for so many reason - there is a lot of scale here - from the really delicate ridging and veination of the petals, to the larger geometrics of the flower petals, cups, stems and leaves with lots in between as well. I also like the delicate illumination on the bottom of the flowers providing a rather interesting contrast to the stronger translucent qualities at the top of the petals. The oddly delinquent petal off on the right and the swirl pattern of it's veins really makes the whole shot and keeps it from being just another shot of spring tulips.
Camera wise, the 5D mkII is simply a dream tool for me. This image was taken with an older mark I version of the famous Canon 'nifty fifty' EF 50mm f1.8 lens. There is just so much more of a smooth color gradient available for processing here especially in a 16 byte color space that it's just like playing in butter compared to the range provided by my old reliable Canon 20D.
Processing wise, I went through a series of sketches with this image, looking at Titanium, Titanium-Platinum, and Platinum-Platinum tri-tones before finally settling on the Pt-Pt toning.
The usual adjustment steps of level & curves were followed by conversion to black and white using Nik Silver Efx. Increasingly, I am using an ISO 100 Agfa black and white film simulator. I find it gives me a nice grain and a wide tonal range with which to work. Similar speed films from Kodak produce much darker tones with fewer highlights while those from Fuji and Ilford tend to lighten things up at the expense of richness in the mid-darks.
After conversion to B/W, another round of curves and levels were applied to tweak things back into shape a bit followed by the double Platinum toning steps. Finally, a last bit of spotting and some sharpening (Smart Sharpening, radius, 1.1, value =30) and conversion to jpg were done to produce the final image.
My only issue with this image is the grain - I wish that I had been able to shoot it at lower initial ISO. However for a handheld grab shot it's not too terrible.
As always, comments and critiques are welcomed.
This particular image is a crop from a larger image shot. The lighting is all natural and provided by the sun bouncing off of snow (yes snow in in Issaquah mid March!) to provide uplights off the ground and off of snow covered trees in the background to profide back lighting.
I like this image for so many reason - there is a lot of scale here - from the really delicate ridging and veination of the petals, to the larger geometrics of the flower petals, cups, stems and leaves with lots in between as well. I also like the delicate illumination on the bottom of the flowers providing a rather interesting contrast to the stronger translucent qualities at the top of the petals. The oddly delinquent petal off on the right and the swirl pattern of it's veins really makes the whole shot and keeps it from being just another shot of spring tulips.
Camera wise, the 5D mkII is simply a dream tool for me. This image was taken with an older mark I version of the famous Canon 'nifty fifty' EF 50mm f1.8 lens. There is just so much more of a smooth color gradient available for processing here especially in a 16 byte color space that it's just like playing in butter compared to the range provided by my old reliable Canon 20D.
Processing wise, I went through a series of sketches with this image, looking at Titanium, Titanium-Platinum, and Platinum-Platinum tri-tones before finally settling on the Pt-Pt toning.
The usual adjustment steps of level & curves were followed by conversion to black and white using Nik Silver Efx. Increasingly, I am using an ISO 100 Agfa black and white film simulator. I find it gives me a nice grain and a wide tonal range with which to work. Similar speed films from Kodak produce much darker tones with fewer highlights while those from Fuji and Ilford tend to lighten things up at the expense of richness in the mid-darks.
After conversion to B/W, another round of curves and levels were applied to tweak things back into shape a bit followed by the double Platinum toning steps. Finally, a last bit of spotting and some sharpening (Smart Sharpening, radius, 1.1, value =30) and conversion to jpg were done to produce the final image.
My only issue with this image is the grain - I wish that I had been able to shoot it at lower initial ISO. However for a handheld grab shot it's not too terrible.
As always, comments and critiques are welcomed.
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