Springtime

Another month has passed and I had only one new photo to post.

~ Born To Be Wild ~
1/3 sec. @ 100 mm, f/5.6, ISO 100

My wife bought these tulips some 2 months ago. It wasn’t really possible to guess their colour(s) but those ruffled petal edges looked interesting to her. When they opened I really liked the torn edges and colourful blossoms with bright yellow centers and red petals or green petals with red streaks in them as you can see it on the photo. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find any suitable composition without the pistils which may seems as distracting to someone. The photo was taken with afternoon sun behind the flower making the colours really glow.

With nice almost summer weather of last weeks I went outside with a camera couple times to practice but guess what, wind, the spoiler of good photography has been blowing almost all the time! Sometimes so strongly that it did not make sense to go outside with camera at all, sometimes so slightly that not a leave stirred but still too strongly for persisting a fragile flower under 1/100 of second. So after some attempts and failures I decided to work through older unprocessed images and found this one of lily pistils.

~ From A Hand ~
1/8 sec. @ 100 mm, f/2.8, ISO 100

I liked the unusually colourful petals which makes nice background in my opinion. The pistils looks to me like an open 6-finger hand from which center grows the stigma. With the bright fresh colours reminding me a spring it matches the tulip photo above even though the processing and feel of both photos differes a lot. At least they match in my eyes.

Have a wonderful springtime!

Technical information: all photos in this post were taken with Canon EOS 450D camera and Canon EF 100mm USM macro lens mounted to a tripod, under natural conditions, indoors.

Tulip details and some news

I hope that you’re not tired of seeing tulip photos here, yet, because it will be no difference today . When I was taking photos from previous post I focused also on small details of those beautiful tulips. Today I present two photos each with different intention and impact. First one was intended to be very soft with shallow depth of field (DOF). I took a photo with fully open aperture (f/2.8) which gave me the softness I wanted but unfortunately DOF wasn’t deep enough for capturing all the details in stamen so I took another photo with exactly the same composition but with little bit wider DOF (f/4). Then I stacked both images in Photoshop with the f/2.8 on top and I created a mask in which I carefully painted the stamen so it became visible from the layer below. After some final touches in Lightroom I got result which you can see here.

~ Fluffy ~
1/30 – 1/15 sec @ 100 mm, f/2.8 + f/4, ISO 100

Next photo was created at the same time only with slightly different composition but the main goal here was to have everything in focus. For achieving this I had to take 3 shots, each at f/20. I was pretty close to magnification 1:1 and it was impossible to have everything in focus in one shot. Then I did the same procedure of stacking and masking as in previous case and again after some final touches in Lightroom I got satisfying result.

~ Tulip Chaos ~
3 shots at  1.3 sec @ 100 mm, f/20, ISO 100

These photos show also different possibilities of capturing details in complex subjects. First photo shows hot it is possible to separate subject and bring viewer’s attention where you want. In the second photo I wanted to capture the complexity of the subject and the chaos created by nature. It wasn’t easy to find suitable composition and framing but I hope I succeeded. Viewer’s eyes slide across the photo not knowing where to stop and that’s what I like also.

Let me know if what I did works for you or does not and why. Your constructive criticizm always helps me to be better.

And now it is the right time for NEWS. I have three of them.

First, I sold first photos! It was rather coincidence. I did preparation for selling my photos in the beginning of this year and even before I displayed them in any shop/gallery I was contacted via Flickr by lady from Australia who was interested in prints of 2 of my photos and directly in dimensions 80x120cm (31.5″ x 47.6″). What a luck! The good part was that I had everything ready and so I could cooperate immediately, the bad part was that she was asking for making the prints using printing service with which she has good previous experience but I had none. After gaining more information about the service and short communication with them I decided to go ahead. Today my first client has the prints, “gorgeous” to use her own words, in her office and I know that I can relly on Brilliant Prints in future. I am so happy!

Second, my prints are now available in another internet gallery, it is company where I make my photos print. Bad news for all but Czechs is that gallery is primarilly in Czech language and even though it can be translated into English it is done automatically using google translation service and the results are not always granted. The link to gallery is here.

Third, I became a father for second time! My 2nd son was born on 1st May and I really wish it has no big impact on my time for photography but I think that it will remin only as a wish. My family is my priority nr. 1 anyway.

Enjoy May in full bloom!

Technical information: all photographies in this post were taken with Canon EOS 450D camera and Canon EF 100mm USM macro lens mounted to a tripod, in natural conditions, indoors.

Tulips in Black & White

Tulips are amazing flowers. So graceful and delicate with their thick wax petals, tall stems and proudly standing heads. We have been buying cut flowers to our bedroom very often in last months and tulips were the most frequent ones. Once we bought beautiful white tulips which turned out to be the variety with much more petals then only those surrounding the blossom’s center. I decided to try both high-key and low-key kind of photos with them beside some macro shots of center details which I will present in some of next posts. Now I would like to present one high key photo and one low key. Here is the first one:

~ FHK #011 – White Tulip ~
1/3 sec. @ 100 mm, f/10, ISO 100

It was tricky to get all subjects in the photo with right tonality because the leaf on the left side was very dark. Finally, the luminosity masking technique produced the best result.

Following photo is more classical low key image than those from previous post. I leave the judgment up to you.

~ FLK #003 – Trinity ~
1/3 sec. @ 100 mm, f/16, ISO 100

I tried various presets of conversion to B&W but after all I manualy changed the tones and their lightness in Lightroom. It was also a bit tricky to get all the details as I wanted. I wanted high contrast but I didn’t want to loose all details in leaves. I must say that I’m pretty happy with the result.

Let me know if you like these photos or not and why. What works for you, what would you change or do differently? This all helps me to understand how you perceive my creations and how could I do it better next time.

Enjoy spring!

Technical information: all photographies in this post were taken with Canon EOS 450D camera and Canon EF 100mm USM macro lens mounted to a tripod, in natural conditions, indoors.

Tulip in Low Key

I will start generally. Low key lighting which is used in photography or film industry is a technique using usually only 1 light source and working with a strong contrast. You will find monochromatic or almost monochromatic images in low key very often. Photos created with this technique evoke feelings of darkness, deep sadness and strong tension. If I say “noir” and “Sin City” I think you are at home.

Or I can say it even more simply. Low key photograph has all the information (or at least majority) in lower half of the histogram. In opposite high key photograph it is vice versa. See histogram below for one of photos in this post.

Since I took first photos in high key more than one year ago (look at this post about it) I always wanted to try a low key photo of some flower. I always imagined a dark flower with black or very dark background even though  it is posible to make a low key photo with almost any flower, or generally any subject, no matter if it is bright or dark. Still I wanted to try it with dark flower. I really liked the idea of “dark on dark”.

When I was in a flower shop to buy something to shoot with during unexpectadly free day couple weeks ago I saw beautiful very dark violet tulips with ragged petals (parrot tulips?).

After lunch when light in our dining room is optimal (we have a big window there so it’s my temporary studio) I started a session with these beautiful tulips. I took quite a lot of photos and was able to process only part of them. Very first one was the photo in this post and as you can see it wasn’t a low key photo at all. Still I took the session with intention of creating low key images. Quite soon I realized a problem with natural lighting. For high key image you need a strong ambient light (indirect light or shade is a must for flower photography) and just keep an eye on a histogram to not overexpose a single pixel. For a low key image ambient/indirect light isn’t enough. With dark flowers there is always danger that even the ambient light will create reflections on some parts of the flower. In this case I got ugly reflections on petals and I needed to additionally shade the flower. This resulted in very limited light then. Fortunatelly it was enough for some decent aperture times. Finally I was able to process 2 images below which would make for a nice diptych in my opinion.

~ FLK #1 – Tulip ~ 1 sec. @ 100 mm, f/5.6, ISO 100	~ FLK #2 – Ragged ~ 1/2 sec. @ 100 mm, f/6.3, ISO 100

As I wrote in the beggining, low key technique works with higher contrast. Here the contrast is more than twice higher in comparison with my other/”normal” photos.

I am so happy with these photos that I decide to start a new series with them. As I already have Flora in High Key series, the new one is called analogically, Flora in Low Key. It is true that I haven’t seen much floral photos in low key so far so I think it is quite original and I’m really looking forward reactions of viewers and yours as well, of course.

Enjoy spring flowers in full bloom!

Technical information: all photographies in this post were taken with Canon EOS 450D camera and Canon EF 100mm USM macro lens mounted to a tripod, in natural conditions, indoors.

Desperation

Do you know that feeling when you think that you came up with a great idea just to find out that someone else not only had it earlier but also did something with it, used it to get some great results? I was thinking about my photography lately. I was thinking what could I try to create something really original. I was thinking about motion blur technique, perhaps about small series of photos from nature created by using this technique because I haven’t seen it much in use lately, if not counting some experimental work. Then I was visiting blogs of the photographers I am following and, after some time, also of those who I’m not following regularly such as Jim Goldstein and there I saw it. Whole series of fantastic photos created by motion blur (and not only) technique called Color fields!

I was also thinking about my flower photography and, again, what could I do to achieve a unique results. I was thinking about the flower photography in general. You know, flower photographers are sometimes offended that they try to create perfect photos, looking only for perfect flowers without spotted or ragged petals, in the most fresh state, just open at best. So I thought, what if I’ll try to make great photos also with flowers which are not perfect? Those faded or wet or ragged or however crippled. I saw creations from photographers trying this but what I saw was usually morbid rather than nice. And then I visited, again after some time, blog by Mike Moats where I noticed his “Finding character in…” posts such as this one about Gerbera daisy or this about Black Eyed Susan.  Mike has created a whole book about it! Got it?

Ok, it doesn’t mean that I can’t use these amazing shots by amazing photographers as inspiration but it mainly means that I need to think a bit harder. Maybe I’ll come up with something unique one day. Or maybe I’m just too young and naive.

Last drop. Two weeks ago my friend visited me and when he was looking through my printed “portfolio” (quite emphasized word for it) he stopped with one monochrome photo in his hand saying “Wow, this is great! It looks exactly like those photos from IKEA!”

~Tulip Dreams ~
1/2 sec. @ 100 mm, f/4, ISO 100

If you also have such a “down” moments in these days, hopefully this fresh spring photo can cheer you up a bit.

Enjoy spring!

Technical note: all photos in this post were taken with Canon EOS 450D camera and Canon EF 100mm USM macro lens mounted to a tripod, under natural conditions, indoors.