Coneflowers & Asters underneath the D90

Still waiting for the fall to arrive, I’ve been taking pictures of flowers when I get a chance and was able to get these beautiful flowers one night after work. I targeted the purple coneflower and aster with the camera on this particular shoot.

I set up the D90 for close up photography with extension tubes and used the 18-105mm or 70-300mm lense on the Slik tripod. Shooting in AV mode, I used a range of apertures from f8 up to f18 to vary what I wanted in focus. While using a low ISO of 200 or 400, the shutter speeds were on the low end so I’m glad I had a good tripod. The D90 was set to RAW to allow me more flexibility in post process.

Nikon’s ViewNX was used to make changes to the white balance, picture control, exposure and shadow/highlight protection. Without using RAW, I wouldn’t be able to make these important adjustments when the image is not quite to my liking. The custom landscape-nature picture control was used for all of these.

The final step was done in PSE8 were I used the cloning and healing brush tool to get rid of imperfections and spider webs that were in between some of the pedals. Clipping masks and fliters/plug-in’s were then used to give the coneflower and aster a special look. From PSE8, I used poster edges and craquelure filters and used a WWII black and white filter from VirtualPhotographer to give them that extra special look. With a lot of edges on these flowers, I zoomed in between 200-300% in order to erase the clipping mask with the brush.

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