Sunflower Countryside

Driving by the local marsh that I duck hunt on, I discovered sunflower plants alongside the road. With the sun shining on them as it was going down at night, I stopped a couple of different times to use my camera.

Since some of the sunflowers were down in the ditch by the water, I used either my Slik tripod or Manfrotto monopod to steady the camera. To control the depth of field and what was in focus, I put the Nikon D90 in AV mode and adjusted the aperture from f5.6 to f13 on different shots. As usually, I shot in RAW to allow me to adjust white balance and other important settings on the computer. I also used the bracketing feature on the D90 which made me want to shut off the autofocus and VR on the lenses that I used. I switched between the Nikon 18-105mm and the Sigma 50-150 mm lense to get these images.

The images were processed in ViewNX or Adobe RAW (PSE8) by adjusting the white balance, picture control and sharpness if needed. This was the first time I processed RAW images in Adobe Camera RAW which allowed me to get a different looking image then ViewNX. The feature I like about Adobe Camera RAW was the fill light adjustment which helped me lighten up some dark spots in the image without affecting other areas too much.
Final post processing was done in PSE8 and EasyHDR. I created a few HDR images by combining different exposed shots in EasyHDR and adjusting the saturation and tone curve settings. Using PSE8 and the plug in VirtualPhotographer, I processed some of the sunflower images into b/w backgrounds, poster edges, nightscope b/w, etc. to create different looking images. In order to use those, I had to use layer masks and the paint brush to delete the parts of the image that I wanted to be left alone.

Finally, the finished image was copied into the gallery frame that I created in PSE8 to show off the photograph in a more professional manner. This gallery frame will be used for my photography from now on this website and in other areas where I post such as facebook and hunting forums.

#1. b/w background

#2. HDR processed

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#5. HDR processed on a b/w background

#6. HDR processed.

#7 HDR processed

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#9. Nightscope b/w background from VirtualPhotographer

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#17. Poster Edge filter in PSE8

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