B&W Beauty ~ Floral Friday!

"Simple Grace"

Well, I did promise Floral Friday here at the blog and deviated from the Doors Open theme. But thought I'd stay with my theme of B&W that I kept with also through the week. I'll be curious to see what your thoughts on this are. When I thought about the perfect flower to convert into mono tones, orchids came to mind... unique shapes, great veins of texture, and a bit of a compositional challenge when you lack a macro lens to fill the frame with.

The Platinum fx filter in Corel is lovely to work with, or at least, it's become one of my personal faves. When you take it into the curves function in PSPx3, you can fine tune every tone, every shadow, every highlight with a nice depth that is a little less stark than a classic B&W option. Perfect for floral shots. But that's just me. Every artist has their own approach. In a separate layer I added a bit of subtle texture, and with an eraser tool erased most of the clean background revealing the canvas effect underneath, leaving the flowers for sharpness. I merged the layers when I decided I had achieved the right opacity. Otherwise, the background was too bright for the image.

I shot this in my kitchen actually. I was playing with window light, a cheap white sheet stretched across the window acting as a diffuser, and my telephoto to get in close to the orchid in the foreground, blowing out the backdrop slightly and using a larger aperture so that I could get a much shallower depth of field artistically.

Enjoy today's image folks, and thanks for the ramble! Have a fabulous weekend and please remember to click on the Circle of Moms badge on the right hand side of my blog page if you've been enjoying my photographs! Thanks everyone who has already voted!

Today's Tulips ~ Floral Friday!

" A Time For Tulips"

(2.5 sec @ F/9, ISO 100, 50mm fl, 50mm f/1.4 prime lens, Nikon Speedlight Sb-600, Gary Fong Light Sphere)

Happy Friday everyone! My post today is short and sweet. I'm just itching for the weekend!

I've been playing with my flash more this week, and I have to say that when I pair it with my 50mm prime and Fong's flash diffuser, you get some wonderful results. Light is dispersed nicely through the light sphere, and the 50mm lens makes me more conscious of my framing and my DOF. Here's two very different results.

There has been some slight editing to both images. In the above, I applied some of PSPx3's clarify filter, and desaturated the color a tad which emphasized the textures from the clarify application. In the image below, I only had a bit of return strobe happening as the shutter released and relied more on the available light coming in from the right side. Later in editing, I selected the warm light tones and heightened them a bit in a new layer before saving. I like them both, but I believe my favorite is the later...which one is yours?

Have a fabulous weekend folks, and thanks for letting me ramble on!

"Tulip's Last Light"
(1/2sec @ F/9, ISO 100, 50mm fl, 50mm f/1.4 prime lens, Nikon Speedlight SB-600, Gary Fong Light Sphere, diffused side light, tripod, remote shutter)

Dancing Tulips ~ Experimental Thursdays!

"Beauty When They Sway"

(5.sec @ F/8, ISO 100, zoom back to 110mm fl, 55-200mm zoom lens, spot metering)

Our image today is a result of a floral shoot I did over the weekend. I was feeling poetic, creative, artistic. And bored. Yup, you heard me. Things felt stale, photographically speaking. If novelists get writer's block, I guess photographers get ... camera block?

Meeting deadlines, having routines, and setting personal goals can be great, till they begin to stifle your passion and your delight with what you love doing. Creative types especially fall prey to this. If we're not careful, the practical takes over and we lose inspiration to keep exploring. Especially if what we love pursuing is also our full time vocation.

Was making great progress on learning some new lighting, which angles and POV's worked best, and looked beautiful with the tulips I'd set up on the seamless. But flicking back through the camera to see the contents I'd created, everything looked elegant but stiff. Dare I say it... boring. Ugh. Not one spontaneous image amongst them. I was so used to being in work mode that my playful side had disappeared.

So, I placed the tripod close, dimmed the lighting a little and using a long exposure and anchored camera, I began zooming in and out of the frame with my telephoto zoom. When you do this as the camera is still taking the shot, you get a blur effect. Results are fairly spontaneous, you'll always find a rather abstract yet delightful surprise lurking in your collection of shots. And it was fun. I personally love abstract art, especially work based on nature itself. I chose this one to show, because the initial subjects are still fairly sharp considering what I was doing with the lens, and a very subtle wash of color fills the background. Later I applied a bit of a displacement layer in PSPx3 to create an artistic 3D shaping to the front subjects. It adds a soft definition. What do you think? All I know is that I spent just as much time playing with my camera as I had being serious, and the change felt good.

Don't forget your initial passion for what you love. When it shines, you feel motivated and rejuvenated. Throw your reserve out the window and play. Your photography will thank you for it.

Thanks for letting me ramble, have a good day exploring what you love!