Digital Photography, Mod 5, 2017: Bonnie - Week 5

It's Class Macro Time

Starting in Color. Glorious Color!

There's no doubt about it, I love taking pictures of flowers.

The shapes, the colors, all the varieties...and whether they're blooming weeds, or not, I just love everything about them!

And this week, I did finally shoot in RAW! I'm still learning the difference in editing for RAW versus other photos, so it's a slow but steady learning curve.

Orange Tiger Lily

For this photo I tried to bring a little lightness to the bottom two right flower petals by lassoing and changing the levels. Other than that I increased the color saturation and erased a low hanging stem in the top. Behind the top right hand side petal is a blue hydrangea, and I liked how it blurred out and almost looks like a halo around the flower petal.

Mom's Hydrangea

This hydrangea bush has sentimental value to me as it's a transplanted stem that propagated from my mom's hydrangea bush. I lassoed and adjusted the contrast on the inside by adjusting levels, and increased a bit of saturation overall for color.

Unknown Weed

I have absolutely no idea what this is, but it sprouts up every year in my backyard and I typically chop it down before it fully blooms, so I'm not sure what it would look like flowered. It does have an interesting shape to it, however, so I thought it would make for an interesting subject. For this photo I cropped it and lassoed the bud area and adjusted the levels for brightness.

Heuchera Berry Marmalade

These are the blooming stalks of flowers from a Heuchera perennial that I have in my window boxes. I cropped and rotated the photo so the stem looks like it is dropping from the top, when actually it grows straight up. I lassoed the stalk and brought the levels up to brighten the color and then inversed the selection to reach the outer portion and increased the contrast. There was a section of mismatched bright green color at the top that I erased to keep the blurred silver-grey and black background intact.

Favorite Photo #1

Lupine-Like Weed

These stalk like lupines sprouted up in a pile of dirt we have on the outskirts of our yard that we use to fill in and level areas while we landscape. I'm certain they're nothing more than weeds though. For this photo I cropped and kept the growth angle to keep the photo more interesting, rather than straighten it. I lassoed and feathered the stalk area and adjusted the brightness and contrast levels which brought out the buds that were just beginning to open. I inversed the selection and deepened the contrast of the background. The bokeh background occurred naturally and I really liked the effect of the orbs. The other foliage and other vegetation in the area gave a nice splatter of blurred green and purple/grey in the background, that I really liked, as well.

Tiger Lily Revisited

The day after I took the original top Tiger Lily photo I came home just after my husband watered the plants outside so I had an opportunity to catch some water droplets on the flower petals (far right). What I didn't realize was that there was also a bug of some type on the far left upper mid-section, perched on edge of the flower petal, that I didn't notice until I started editing. I tried to crop it to feature the bug, but it pixeled out (in spite of using RAW). I lassoed the bug and feathered and adjusted to brighten it a bit, but unfortunately it's not as prominent as I had hoped it would be. Other than that, the only overall edits I made were to deepen the saturation of color.

Salvia(?)

This is what I believe is purple salvia that grows outside our entrance at work. It was super hard to focus because the blossoms are so tiny and dainty that it kept changing focus. I just kept snapping away hoping I would catch it and eventually I did! And ... NEWS FLASH!!! Here's where I think I FINALLY learned how to edit differently for RAW. A different screen pops up that allows for individual adjustments of just about everything, so I experimented with every sliding adjustment to some extent in this photo just to see what each would do. Other than editing everything, I didn't crop or straighten anything, allowing the natural formation to exist 'as is'. One thing I noticed when experimenting with the different levels was that the left hand side stalk became more prominent in the photo, which I thought gave a visual balance to the flowering stems on the right.

Favorite Photo #2

Ending in Some Beautiful Tones of Black and White

After all that color I thought I would end on a more restful bit of black and white.

Vinegar Jar

This is the handle of a vinegar jar that we keep on our lunch table at work. I thought the handle made for an interesting shape in macro. Adjusting the levels for contrast and brightness brought out the shadow of the weld, as well as some interesting striations of color in the glass jar.

Tea Kettle

Another photo from our lunch area at work, this time a tea kettle. I loved the lines of this cherry red tea kettle, but changed the photo to black and white. There I found another new tool to adjust by color, in spite of being in black and white. When adjusting the red hue, it brought the gray-ish teakettle to a beautiful shiny black. It also increased the reflection of the fluorescent fixture above it. I tried to erase it, but it was blurring it more than erasing, so I "stepped backward" and kept it there as a little window. I cropped and straightened the photo a bit and I really liked the high contrast of the light wall and the dark teakettle.