Cleome

[DanK]

All comments welcome. These are big flowers, so I had to be about 1m away. That in turn made stacking easy despite the depth of the flower: only 4 images. Stacked in Zerene DMap with editing from a PMax composite.

[xpatUSA]

A gorgeous flower, Dan, well-captured and processed.

Have you considered backgrounds other than jet-black? For example, I just now tried a complementary dark Teal and it didn't look quite so harsh to my old eyes. Ignoring the greens in the middle, a cyan-green might have worked a bit mo' better. i.e. complementary to just the petals' color.

Your red channel has a bit of clipping but not excessively so. Picky, picky ...

[DanK]

Ted,

Thanks. Yes, I've been thinking about other backgrounds. This is pure black. (I suspect you'll recall that debate here.) For colors, however, I wouldn't want a completely uniform background; I'd want either texture or lower-frequency variation. Easier said that done. That rules out a simple color substitution in postprocessing. I've looked at all of the backdrops I can find for my sysem (Westcott X-drop), and none seem very appealing for this purpose. Many oare textured images with vignettes that are clearly designed for portraits, and most are either gray, brown, or a mix. Some of them are also very expensive for what they are.

At some point, I'll go into fabric stores to browse. Can't do it now; we've been told to stay out of stores, even if masked, because of the risk that we might get a breakthrough COVID infection that would be trivial for us but dangerous for our immunocompromised grandkid. In any case, without a fair amount of work, it wouldn't work with the X-drop system, so when the time comes, I'll have to buy or improvise a different support.

I do have a white X-drop backdrop that is a very slightly textured fabric, and I may use that for some images down the road.

Dan

[Round Tuit]

Hi Dan,
You have a beautifully photographed flower. I like that it sits closer to the bottom of the frame than to the top. What was your reason for cropping the top and the bottom rather than including the whole flower within the frame?
Are the two different shades of green leaves their natural colour or is that a result of the lighting?

[billtils]

Perfectly gorgeous!

And I enjoyed the comment on the value of being 1m away (I guess it is an ISO 1 metre and not a US 1 mile ).

[DanK]

Thanks, Andre and Bill. Andre: I lopped off some of the long filaments to keep the main body of the flower large enough. The two greens were a result of lighting.

Bill--I've been annoyed my entire life by having to fuss with the foolish Imperial system, with its irrational units and reliance on fractions rather than decimals. The US was on track to abandon it--slowly--until Ronald Reagan abolished the responsible agency in 1982. Which is easier to divide by two: 1 foot 4 5/8 inches or 422 mm? Or to divide by three: 1 quart 3 ounces or 54 cm? I decided a while ago I'm old enough to be an eccentric old geezer, and sometimes I'll just use metric anyway. In an international forum like this, that's what's familiar to many people anyway. And my fellow Americans will cope. It's good for them, like people used to think cod liver oil was. Unfortunately, one area in which this isn't really possible is photo printing. Paper is sold only in Imperial sizes in the US, and the place from which I order framing materials doesn't even offer the option of setting their website to metric. So, I'm stuck with annoying arithmetic like "The image width is 18 7/16; I want a border of 2 3/4 inches; I want a negative overlap of 3/8 inch..."

Dan

[xpatUSA]

Ted,

Thanks. Yes, I've been thinking about other backgrounds. This is pure black. (I suspect you'll recall that debate here.) For colors, however, I wouldn't want a completely uniform background; I'd want either texture or lower-frequency variation. Easier said that done. That rules out a simple color substitution in post-processing.

Dan,

This may not be of interest but the GIMP has lots of gradients and also patterns to choose from to use as a background. Since you did all the hard work of selecting the flower only, I just had to play:



Open in "LyteBox" and click back and forth.

The pattern was 'Stones'. I filled a layer with the pattern, Gaussian blurred it and darkened it down quite a bit. Then added your black background inverted as a mask. Just two layers needed - one for the background and one for the flower. You might find the background too regular for your taste but the GIMP has all sorts of distortions or other effects e.g. Swirl, Oilify, etc. to break it up. And a background image can be exported and saved separately for future use ...

Instead of creating a background image, you could just capture something around the house or even trawl the net. Then edit it and use with a background mask.

Pardon me if I'm teaching Granny to suck eggs ...

[DanK]

Ted,

That's an interesting suggestion. I don't use the Gimp, but there are untold thousands one can download and use in Photoshop. Actually, I started creating a folder of background images for other types of photos but hadn't thought of doing it for this type.

It's easy enough to find monochrome images with texture created by shadows. Backgrounds with a mix of colors will take more searching or work.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Dan

[pschlute]

That is a beautiful capture