Saturday, August 21, 2010

More Sunflowers

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As I promised in my previous blog here are some additional ideas of what do with sunflowers.

Blog Images:

The lead blog image is just a simple close-up but getting it wasn’t simple. I was shooting outdoors in the early morning light. There was just the slightest breeze, but not enough to let me shoot the length of exposure I needed for f36 (need the DoF when you are this close). A really high ISO might have gotten me there, but instead I shot at f10 at 1/30sec and ISO 640 and shot five images each with the focal point moving from the front of the flower to the back pedals. As in a previous blog I used the focus stacking capability of Photoshop CS5.

Blog_20100730_1-2A bridal veil drawn vertically across a group of sunflowers was used to create the unique look shown here. The shutter was a bit long to allow the veil to blur a bit. Window light and reflectors were again used for illumination.

The next image was shot in the same field as those in my previous blog using the wheat as a background. For the unique look shown here I applied the Monday Morning – Sepia filter from  Nik Software’s ColorEfx Pro. Viveza 2 was used to lighten the lower center of the sunflower. Finally  the edges and wheat were burned in using Photoshop’s burn tool.

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In the final image, three sunflowers were arranged in a vase in my studio and shot using window light and reflectors against a black background. A wide angle lens was used to create the perspective (I don’t use wide angle lenses indoors all that often). Again I used the Monday Morning filter but with different slider adjustments. After that the Tonal Contrast filter was used to bring out a bit more texture. The face of the front sunflower was lightened a bit using Viveza 2.

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NOTE: I plan on adding How-To videos to my blog in the near future. If there is any image you would like me to walk through the post processing  let me know.