Daisies over Memorial Day

Over Memorial Day weekend, I took a trip out to Springbrook Park to do some family photographs and on the way back through the park, noticed a batch of daisy’s in full bloom. With the new Zeiko’s extension tubes in my camera bag, it was a great opportunity to try them out.

With the Nikon D90 in hand and on my Slik tripod, I used the 18-105mm lense to take these images. The camera was set to AV mode and RAW along with a base ISO of 200 to get the best quality of image. I changed the aperture from low to high to vary the depth of field on what daisies were in focus. I ended up using the 12mm and 20mm extension tubes on this lense as well. Being the first time I used extension tubes, I was amazed at how close I could get to the daisy and still be in focus. Of course, with extension tubes, your depth of field is very limited so one must pay special attention to focus.

The images were processed in ViewNX with very minor adjustments to exposure and shadow/highlight protection. The white balance was changed to direct sunlight and the picture control to my custom landscape-nature settings

Once in PSE8, I then used the cloning tool to clean up some imperfections to the daisy pedals and other areas. Since I enjoy using clipping masks, I processed some of the images into black and white using the VirtualPhotographer plug-in. Clipping masks allowed me to keep the daisy in color while the background was turned to black and white. I also used Jerry Jones textures on just one image this time since my backgrounds were much better then with the alstromeria images.

After taking these daisy images with the extension tubes, I really look forward to more macro work with them!

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