I have two images again today which sort of kills the rules of one image a day but they are related because the baby's breath was in with the roses...so it's okay, right?!? :) I guess I can't get enough of my macro lens and flowers are incredibly fun to take photos of. My Valentines roses are beginning to wither and die so I thought I'd try a close up as I have always wanted to do with a rose. I've seen some beautiful images of roses shot very close. Some realistic and some abstract. Between the roses and the baby's breath I took 40 shots total. I really enjoy this rose shot but I'm not too keen on the final color. I should have used a custom white balance on this one so I could get the true rich deep and velvety red that the flower actually was. I used my tripod and shot this in front of my sliding glass door with natural light with my white balance set on fluorescent (dumb move...didn't realize it at the time) which is contributing to the more fuchsia color that the flower appears to have in it's highlights. I don't believe it is really what my eye truly saw. Aside from the color, I'm really pleased with the clarity and composure of this shot. My settings from shooting with my Nikon D200 are as follows. Shutter speed: 1/25 sec, Aperture: F8, ISO 400, WB: Fluorescent, Focal Length: 60mm.
Baby's Breath I spent a little longer on because I wanted to use something I read in the Bryan Peterson book called Understanding Close Up Photography that my friend Chrystal gave me for my birthday. One of the sections talks about how he had placed a colorful object in the background to make the subject stand out. I had the hot pink card envelope that came with my flowers that I tried first. I didn't like that at all. So, I put a playing card that had a red and white diamond pattern on it that I knew would look more like a pinkish color with my macro blurring it. It came out too washed out. Yellow and white always looks so "springtime" to me like in daisies so I got a piece of yellow notebook paper and shot a bunch of shots on different white balances and composure's until I got this one. I love the white balance and the soft blurry spots of white randomly in the background with the one white Baby's Breath blossom dominating the image. My settings are as follows: Shutter speed: 1/15sec, Aperture: F4, ISO 100, WB: Cloudy, Focal Length: 60mm.
1 comment:
Good photo of the rose Heather! I agree that the color is not right. But the focus on the rose is great! And, the color that you produced is still nice. I just love the Baby's Breath with the yellow in the background! Awesome! Great job as always. :)
Post a Comment