Saturday, August 16, 2014

Tiger Lilies Up Close


Back in June, bright pink and white tiger lilies were in full bloom and on a calm night, I was able to get out and take photographs of these beautiful flowers.

I like to get up close to the lilies so I used my Zeikos extension tubes on the 24-120 lense and the D90. Because I’m shooting macro, I put the camera on my tripod and use a 5 second self timer to keep camera vibration to a minimum. I manual focus and had VR off on the lense. Shooting in RAW, the aperture was right around f18 or f22 in ISO 200 or 400. Exposure compensation was also adjusted and I added in the SB-700 speed light too. I took different photographs with the flash at different angles.

Once uploaded in ViewNX, I changed the white balance to direct sunlight and used three different picture controls (standard, landscape, nature-landscape). Highlight and shadow sliders were also adjusted to fine tune the image. I did create a couple HDR images so I processed them like in the past by creating multiple exposed images and merging them together in Easy HDR.

Photoshop Elements 11 put the final touches on the image using the clone brush tool, levels layer, and high pass filter. The clone brush helped me get rid of unwanted insects that flew into the frame while taking the picture and the levels layer helped with exposure. I used the high pass filter to sharpen the image when I was done.

While getting my D90 fixed, I rented the Nikon D7100 for 10 days and took a few close up flower shots as well to see how it compared to the D90. The increased resolution between the cameras is visible as the D7100 picks up more detail on the orange flower in my mind. I only took a dozen shots of flowers with the D7100 but used it a couple nights at the golf course so I look forward to processing them.

#1.
 
#2.
 
#3.
 
#4.
 
#5. Bokeh filter as background
 
#6. HDR
 
#7.
 
#8.
 
#9.
 
#10. HDR
 
#11. Taken with D7100
 
#12. Taken with D7100
 
#13. Taken with D7100

No comments: