Category: flowers

My photo class is over- the last assignments were due yesterday.  Today I am taking it easy, photography-wise (truth be told, yesterday I was too). I got some flowers at Trader Joe’s yesterday, knowing that it would be Macro Monday today.

So here are some macro shots of a sunflower, lazily shot in Aperture Priority and bravely edited in Lightroom. Because I used Auto ISO, one of these shots had a crazy high ISO- so noise reduction had to be employed!

I’ve been wanting to photograph the CUTEST little pot I received from my friend, Claudia as an early birthday gift- but I was going to wait until I got some pansies to plant in our garden.  Well- with the backyard in turmoil with all the repairs and de- (and re-)construction going on, it may be awhile before I get some pansies.

Hello, geraniums!

The pot is TINY, ceramic, and pierced with itty bitty holes, just big enough for little flower stems.  These flowers would tip over and fall out of a regular vase, but are totally supported in the pansy pot. I love it! Thank you, Claudia!

(beautiful azaleas from my son, Matt <3<3<3)

I’ve been working on my photo class all morning.  I uploaded photos I took in Wyoming as well as ones from a few days ago and this morning- each one satisfying a different requirement.  And all of them have to be SOOC (straight out of camera)- no cropping or editing of any kind.

After the (self-imposed) pressure of finding the best SOOC images to post, it was a relief to edit a couple for the blog.

Here is the one I took this morning, which looked pretty good SOOC for the class, but so much better (to my eye) when given a boost with a soft light blend mode and with distracting background elements eliminated by blowing out the background with a levels layer.

And here’s another that I did not use for the class.  It was slightly cropped, edited in Aperture 3 (definition, contrast) and with a soft light blend mode added in Photoshop.

Yup- I have homework! As I’ve mentioned, I’m taking Karen Russell’s fabulous photography class, which I wish I had taken a year ago instead of stumbling around learning in bits and pieces from everywhere. The lesson I focused on today was on Exposure Compensation, which I remember learning about on Pioneer Woman’s blog when I was first starting out.  Since I went almost directly to manual, pretty much bypassing Aperture and Shutter Priority, I haven’t had occasion to practice with this much- until now.

It’s interesting- and has made me think about Ansel Adams’ Zone System, which I was trying to learn before I started taking this class. Without going into it much, I noticed today that the tones I metered/focused on directly affected how much exposure compensation was needed (metering/focusing on a darker tone made the whole photo over-exposed).

I did the assignment twice, with two different types of flowers. I liked my focus best on the geraniums, so that is the photos you are seeing.  Both shots are straight out of camera (gasp!).

The original exposure:

My preference, which is -2/3 stops exposure compensation:

It really is a matter of preference in this case. I prefer the deeper tones in the flowers in the second shot and the lighter background in the first. The other flowers I photographed today were DRAMATICALLY over-exposed, using the camera’s exposure without exposure compensation.   And in that case, I had focused on the deep brown center of my daisy.  Zone System!