Sunday, March 7, 2010

Magnolias

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Magnolia’s are sure one beautiful flower to shoot – so soft. I just got a chance to shoot a star magnolia last night and the bud of a tulip magnolia earlier in the day. In the next week or so the magnolias at Portland’s Hoyt Arboretum should be at peak. I am looking forward to that. I visited there Friday and the buds were just starting to break.

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Blog images:

  1. The first image is a selective blend of two exposures. One is as sharp of the core center as possible. The other was as shallow a depth a field of possible to get the orange globe from a house light. I used the center region from the first.
  2. The second image is an in camera blend of a sharp focused bug overlayed with a complete soft focus bud (which creates the glow).
  3. Shot at a moderate aperture of f9 to get a region of the magnolia sharp while keeping the car in the background out of focus. The cars color picked up on the pink in the magnolia.
  4. This last image is shot at f7 to keep the light gap in the tree limbs generally round behind the magnolia. This somewhat monotone image captures the ethereal feel of the magnolia.