Roses

I swear I’m going to get out this weekend and get some outdoor pictures, but with a bouquet of flowers in the house, I had to take advantage of the diversity and color contained in a collection of nature’s flowers.

In this shot, I separated the red roses from the bunch, and shot them against a black backdrop. There’s a little too much light coming from below the roses, but it does set them off quite dramatically.

Separating the flowers can provide a much more dramatic picture than just taking a photo of a flower surrounded by other flowers.

Sunflower

This second shot demonstrates this well, and I think I like this shot the best.

The sunflower is isolated, and in this case, I took a closeup of the flower with my Tamron 28-300 mm VC lens (shot at 300 mm). To keep as much in focus as possible, I used a small aperture (f/22) with a long exposure (2 seconds at ISO 200).

By keeping the flower in the corner, it gives a radiating feel to the picture, with the eye drawn to the center of the sunflower and then radiating out from there.

While these two pictures are my favorites, they are only 2 out of about 50 photos that I shot. My normal workflow is to go through a photo shoot, delete any obviously flawed photos (out of focus, etc.), and then pick a small percentage of the rest to continue to work on – correcting exposure, saturation, possibly cropping, etc.

In this situation, out of the 50 I shot, I found about 20 that I felt would benefit from post-processing, and of those only 2 that make the grade to public viewing. In trying something new, however, I thought I’d make some of the ‘outtakes’ available for those that want to see some additional photos. So if you’re one of those, click here to view the rest on my outtake page.