Saturday, July 13, 2013

Tiger Lilies underneath the SB-700

The bright colored lilies started to bloom this summer and on a calm night, I was out with my camera, its accessories and a spray bottle to capture neat designs of these beautiful flowers.

To capture close up’s of flowers, I used the following equipment: tripod, extension tubes and speedlight. I put the extension tubes on the 20-120ft lense and turned off the VR and manual focused because I was using the D90 on the tripod. I also used Live View to zoom in to get better focus. The SB-700 was used to place light on the subject at different angles by hand holding it. To create the water droplets, I used a spray bottle that I had filled with water.

The camera was put into manual mode with a shutter speed of 1/200 and an aperture of f11 with an ISO of 500. The exposure compensation was the setting I adjusted often and it ranged from 0 to -5. I wanted to create a dark background to make the lily stand out and using the speed light with these settings, allowed me to do that. The RAW files from the camera were imported into ViewNX.

Once in ViewNX, I adjusted the white balance to either flash or left it has standard. The picture control was changed to Nature-Landscape and I also adjusted highlight/shadow protection sliders. To fine tune the exposure, I tweaked the exposure compensation as well.

PS Elements 11 was used to clone out unwanted imperfections on the flower petals that show up in close up photography. To create different backgrounds, I used texture files that I have downloaded in the past. I used texture’s that had nice bokeh and adjusted the blend mode on the texture layer to get a look that I liked. I then used the brush tool on the layer to paint over areas that I didn’t want the texture showing through. I used the sharpening tool to adjust sharpness on certain parts of the flower and then used the high pass sharpen filter as well as my last step of post processing.

My favorite image of the tiger lilies is where I took a dark texture with nice bokeh that also has a darker border and put it behind the lily that had water drop lets placed on it. The angle of the speed light on the lily really makes this image stand out.

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