Summer Flowers - Sunflowers, Tiger Lillies & More

Equipment Used: Nikon D750 with 24-120 mm f4 lense, Nikon D90 with 35mm f1.8, 12-24mm f4, 24-120 mm f4 and 75-300mm lenses. Nikon SB-700 Speedlights, Slik Pro 500DX Tripod & Viltrox Remote.

During the summer months, the flowers were in full bloom and on a few still nights, I got out with my camera to capture the bright colors. The D750 captured the lilies, hollyhochs and the purple flowers during the short time I had the rental. The sunflower plot was not in bloom during my rental so I captured all of them with the D90.

I used the above equipment with the following settings: aperture of f9-f18 (f16 & f18 was used to get the sunbursts around the sun), VR off and manual focus on the lense. ISO was either at 200 or 400 and the exposure compensation ranged from 0 to -2. The EC was set to negative when I used the SB-700’s to light up the main part of the flowers.

In NX-D, the white balance was adjusted to direct sunlight and picture control to either landscape or nature-landscape. These adjustments helped bring out more detail and saturation to the flowers. If needed, the highlight/shadow sliders were adjusted as well. Only a few images were turned into HDR, so I used -1, 0 & +1 exposure compensated Tiff files in EasyHDR to process them that I created in NX-D.

Using PSE 11 to finalize the images I first used the clone tool to get rid of unwanted objects in the images. If local adjustments to the exposure in certain parts of the image needed adjusting, I used curve adjustments and layer masks. The final step was using the high pass sharpen filter to sharpen the images.

Now that summer is winding down, it’s time to capture the scenes of waterfowl hunting, harvest and starlit nights.

 

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