Spring Time Daffoldils

With alittle bit of sunshine and warm temperatures, the daffodils are in full bloom this spring. Knowing where there are some flower beds in the area, when the wind was right, I took the opportunity to take some images. With any wind at all, it was tough to keep the daffodils in focus which had me shooting early in the morning or at dusk.

I was able to try out the new lense that I purchased over the winter, the Nikon 12-24 f4 on the D90 along with the 18-105mm. The 12-24 is a wide angled lense and will be a joy to use. I used the Gorilla tripod to be able to get sharp images and the ability for it to get low to the ground and at different angles with its ‘crazy’ legs. With different lighting conditions, I had the camera in AV mode and RAW along with adjusting the aperture and ISO if needed. For the images taken after dusk, I even used the flashlight app off my Droid smart phone to help with lighting.

I processed these in ViewNX and CameraRAW by changing the white balance and picture control. This was done to get the colors to my liking to make the images standout. The sharpening and contrast sliders were also adjusted. Once the images were finalized in ViewNX and CameraRAW, they were sent into PSE8 after being cropped.  In PSE8, cloning was done if needed to get rid of unwanted branches and the like. To create special effects on the images, layer masks and guassian blur tools were used in different ways. Finally, the Virtual Studio plug-in was used for a black and white treatment for the background on a select few images to help the daffodils come off the paper.

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