Flowers are probably one of the most photographed things. I never tire of shooting flowers, or looking at flower photographs.
This morning as I was strolling through my back yard, coffee in hand, I was struck by the simplicity and beauty of the blooming chives. There was a bit of sun filtering through the fence which adds a nice sprinkling of highlights in the shady photo. I ran in and grabbed my camera.
Typically, flower gardens are compositionally busy. There are all sorts of things coming into the frame, including shafts of light, and you need to find a way to simplify and isolate key elements. One way is by using shallow depth of field.
I shot this with my 200mm lens @ f4.0, to enhance shallow depth of field. Being really close to the subject also contributed to that. Shutter speed was 1/200 hand held and ISO 400. There was a slight breeze so the chives were bobbing a little, and so was I, crouched down in front of them. Manual focus allowed me to isolated the foreground. I just love the colours purple and green together.
I also shot some daisies. This proved to be an exposure challenge as the daisies were in full sun in front of a shady area. The goal was to keep detail in the white petals without losing the greenery to the black hole. I made about five versions of the file, using Adobe Camera Raw, before I was satisfied. This is a screen grab of my final ACR settings. As you can see, I kept the overall exposure low to retain highlight detail. I then used the brightness and the fill light sliders to bring back some of the green that was lost. This type of fine tuning could not have been done if the image was shot as a jpg, as there was just too much exposure range to capture in one shot. I also love using the clarity slider in CS4! In this case I added clarity to make the petals really stand out, but in a portrait or baby shot, I subtract clarity as it softens skin very nicely. It's like adding or removing sharpening.
For more garden shots check out this gallery.
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