Hollyhock's underneath the SB-700 Speed Light

Right after the tiger lilies were blooming, the hollyhocks started to bloom as well so I traveled over with my camera gear and captured their unique color and petals as well. I decided to get real close to these flowers so I used larger extension tubes on my camera and lense set up.

The D90 was fitted with the extension tube followed by the 20-120f4 lense with VR off and Live View to manual focus on the middle of the hollyhock. I shot the below images in either manual or aperture priority mode with an f11 to f22 setting. ISO setting was 200-400 and exposure compensation was -2 to -4. The Speed Light was on remote and I moved it around the flower along with changing the flash power from 1/64 to 1/128.

On the computer with ViewNX, I changed the white balance to direct sunlight and the picture control to Nature-Landscape. The exposure compensation and highlight/shadow protection sliders were adjusted if needed on the RAW files.  I created one HDR image of the holly hawks by merging different exposed images into one with EasyHDR software.

Once again in PSE 11, I used the clone brush to get rid of unwanted objects/imperfections on the flower pedals. To selectively sharpen the images, I used just the sharpening tool on this set of images to just sharpen the middle part of the flower.

My favorite photograph from this batch is the HDR processed image that I created that really brightened and saturated the colors of the hollyhock and helped make the water droplets stand out as well.

 

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