Summer Time Tiger Lilies

A few weeks ago the tiger lilies were in full bloom next to the house and with the right lighting conditions, I had to get out the camera on a couple of different nights. Luckily for me, the sun was setting which gave a nice soft glow of light to the lilies.

The majority of these images were taking with extension tubes so I used the Slik tripod to help make sure the camera stayed nice and steady. The D90 was used with either the 18-105mm or the 70-300mm lense. To vary the depth of field, I used AV mode and used a range of apertures from f5.6 all the way up to 18. As I always do, RAW was used and the lowest ISO was used depending on the lighting conditions. Extension tubes are a powerful tool to have in your camera bag in order to get really close to your subject and they work well with both of these lenses.

The images were processed for white balance, shadow/highlight protection and picture controls in ViewNX 2.0. The custom landscape-nature picture control was used for almost all of them but I did use the custom sunrise control a few times on the orange lilies. If needed, cropping was done in ViewNX along with minor adjustments to exposure.

The post processing fun started in PSE8 were I used the cloning tool to clean up some imperfections in the lilies and other areas of the image. Some images required small adjustments to levels and hue/saturation but overall I was happy with the color of the lilies straight out of ViewNX. Since I enjoy giving flower images some extra processing, clipping masks and filters/plug-ins were used. I used the poster edges and lighting filters to give the flowers a unique look. The VirtualPhotographer plug-in was also used with my favorite black and white filter to make the backgrounds into b/w. Different brush sizes on the clipping mask was used to erase the b/w treatment to allow the lily color to come though.

Another trick that I used to get water droplets on the flowers without having to wait for rain was using a small water sprayer and lightly hitting the lily pedals with the mist. It proved to add another dimension to the tiger lilies.

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