Alstromeria and Calla Lily Spring Blossom

With a large wedding reception and brunch being hosted at the Conference Center in mid May, I was able to take home some left over flowers. The beautiful calla lily and the alstromeria were my subjects for these images.

The equipment used was the Nikon D90 and again I used all three Nikon lenses I have after learning that I was able to capture some unique perspectives of flowers on my last shoot. The 70-300mm was used the most followed by the 12-24 mm and 18-105mm. The camera was set to AV mode and RAW along with ISO ranging from 200 to 500. The Gorilla and Slik Pro tripods were used to keep the camera steady. Experimenting with shooting inside on some of these images, I just used a pair of desk lights that I could point at my subject.

This was the first time I made a little “studio” in the basement so the desk lights and a cardboard background was the only thing available. The hardest camera setting to get was the white balance so I shot in RAW so I could adjust it later but the majority of time, left it with what the camera came up with. The nicest thing about shooting inside was no wind which made focusing much easier.

The images were processed in ViewNX with adjustments to the exposure, white balance, picture control and highlight/shadows if needed. My custom landscape-nature picture control was used along with a Top Gear picture control that has been downloaded. Cropping was also done during this step.

Using PSE8, I then used the cloning tool and other techniques to finalize the calla lily and alstromeria images. Because of the cardboard background in my “studio” I used textures for the first time. Textures are a unique way to add a different look to your images. By using them, I believe I improved the look of the images since I was dealing with a boring background.  I used the textures from Jerry Jones at http://shadowhousecreations.blogspot.com/.  Textures were also used on the images taken outside and I found the pollution texture to be to my liking. The opacity of the texture layers were also adjusted to fine tune the post processing.

#1.

#2.

#3.

#4.

#5.

#6.

 #7.

 #8.

#9.

#10.

#11.

#12.

#13.

#14.

#15.

#16.

 #17.

#18.

#19.

#20.

#21.

Tulips in the Spring

In my mind, there isn’t a better flower then a tulip (alittle bias because I’m dutch but they are still the best :) and this spring on a nice May morning, I went into town to find a few flower beds. I found the tulips in a nice full bloom with even a few daffodils planted with them as well. I turned the hat around and started shooting.
 

With the trusty D90, I used the arsenal of Nikkor lenses I had in my bag: 12-24mm, 18-105mm and the 70-300mm. By using the wide zoom range of these lenses, I was able to capture many different angles of the tulips which was even a bit of a surprise to me. The camera was set to AV mode and RAW along with a base ISO of 200. To control the depth of field and lighting, I did adjust the aperture and exposure composition if needed. The ‘crazy’ legged Gorilla tripod was used since I wanted to get different perspectives of the tulips which sometimes caused me to get completely flat on the ground so I was looking up with the camera.

I processed all of these images in ViewNX by changing the white balance, picture control and exposure if needed. The custom landscape-nature picture control curve I’ve created was used most and I even used the custom sunrise one I used last year for golf course images. I adjusted the sharpness from 1 to 3 on the slider since out of the camera, RAW doesn’t have any camera sharpening.

Putting the final touches on them was done in PSE8. With tulips cut off or unwanted objects in the background, the cloning and healing brush tool was used to fix these situations. To enhance some of the images, layer masks, guassian blur, smart brush tool and levels were used in some sort or fashion. As I have come to like, the Virtual Studio plug-in was used for black and white treatment. With the different layers and affects in these images, opacity was used to lower the percentage of these post processing techniques. EasyHDR was also used on the church image to try to capture the whole dynamic range of the scene.

Next year hopefully I will be rewarded with a trip to Orange City or Pella for their tulip festivals; I would need to bring extra batteries and memory cards!

 #1.

#2.

#3.

#4.

#5.

#6.

#7.

#8.

#9.

#10.

#11.

#12.

#13.

#14.

#15.

#16.

#17.

#18.

#19.

#20.

#21.

#22.

#23.

#24.

#25.

#26.

#27.

#28.

#29.