The Little Flower | 24 Oct 2008 | photoblog by LightningPaul

24 Oct 2008 • 977 views

The Little Flower

A shot of one of the flowers I bought for my lovely wife. She adores them. To be honest, I do like flowers a lot myself :-)

TECH-INFO: you might think this is an infra-red or even a UV shot, but it's not. It is captured with my Lensbaby 2.0 together with a +10 macro screw on lens. I used, off camera, a speedlight hand held around 10 cm above the flower. Because the flash is so close, it appears to be a big light source providing directional and rather soft light.
I was missing a bit the details from the flower leafs, so I turned my single RAW file into multiple exposures and ran it through Photomatrix to amplify the beautiful structures. The colors of the end result were still not great. In fact, some of them, like orange and very light green, did not fit well together. Hence I converted into a monochrome image.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: by coincidence this weeks VFXY theme is Macro. This images perfectly suits that.
Now also on Vazaar for the topic Best Macro.

camera	NIKON D200
exposure mode
shutterspeed
aperture	f/8.0
sensitivity	ISO100
focal length	50.0mm
resolution	2435x2439 pixels

The Little Flower

comments (8)

Mary MacADNski

Canada

24 Oct 2008, 02:16

It's very complicated but truly beautiful!

LightningPaul: At first the shot from the camera was great to me. After a while you see the defects and start improving it to show only the best side of the lovely little flower. Thanks for your comments.

genevieve

Canada

24 Oct 2008, 03:11

very nice, very artistic.

LightningPaul: Many thanks.

alex

Germany

24 Oct 2008, 07:52

The more LB pictures i see the more i want one

LightningPaul: I had the same. The look of LB images can be really great. Despite I don't use my LB so much, some of my best images come from that lens. I'm waiting for the newly released LB Composer. As soon I have it I'll start experimenting with it, and write down my findings.

Giorgio

Italy

24 Oct 2008, 08:59

Very nice and original shot. Great work!

LightningPaul: Thanks Giorgio. You are a fantastic flower shooter, but I can try to do better

Not sure at all if I will ever be able to achieve that.

Claus Petersen

Great Britain (UK)

24 Oct 2008, 10:54

This is just super crisp, and the color processing is just spot on!

LightningPaul: Many thanks Claus. I was not sure about this monochrome color. Mostly I tend to pick warm colors but this time I wanted to try something else. I'm happy it turned out well

Framed and Shot

United States

24 Oct 2008, 14:34

Unusual to see it in black and white but it works very well!
Nice texture and we like the tight framing.
Great work and good luck in the VFXY theme competition!

LightningPaul: Many thanks! I just noticed on your site that I have some very strong competition for the VFXY theme

Bill Phillips

United Kingdom

24 Oct 2008, 20:01

This I like very much Paul, am i being greedy wanting the lower petals a little sharper?

LightningPaul: Thanks Bill.
Greedy? Yes and no

I only have macro screw on lenses for my Lensbaby and the smallest aperture is f/8.0. So no other way for me to get this type of shot, hence you are greedy. But you may always ask for more sharpness, especially for macro shots. I think it would make it even better to have it all sharp (though I like the Lensbaby effect too). Hence you are not greedy at all.

Ellie

United Kingdom

24 Oct 2008, 21:59

I like this.

At first I thought it was a butter-pat maker, or a gingerbread mould. I do like what you've done.

LightningPaul: Many many thanks Ellie.

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