Well, nearly.
Charged my camera batteries and formatted my memory cards in anticipation of another lunch hour of photography. However a lengthy lunch time meeting put that idea to rest. So today’s challenge theme of “Architecture” is on hold.
But I do have a new image to share today. An abstract flower triptych.
A few weeks ago photographer Steve McGonnell was the speaker at Queen’s Park Camera, where I am currently serving as president (www.qpcc.co.uk). Steve showed a large selection of his flower photography. It’s something that I hadn’t really tried for myself. So the following weekend I picked up a bunch of supermarket flowers and had a go at some table top flower photographer.
I didn’t really want to go for a straightforward record shot of the flower, I wanted to create something a little more abstract. I set about shooting a few images using extension tubes on my 24-70mm lens to get me in close to the petals with a really narrow depth of field.
I processed the and combined them to produce this triptych:
I desaturated the image and am satisfied with the delicate tones that I’ve achieved. There are a few blown out highlights which would usually lead me to reject an image but in this case I think they work in the context of the image.
I also wanted to try something a bit more experimental and took another flower from the bouquet and planned the shot. This time I wanted to show the whole flower head and that therefore required a backdrop. To make the photograph interesting the backdrop would have to compliment the colours of the flower…but I don’t have hundreds of backdrops, so what should I do? I could have used used coloured gels on a flash gun to light a white backdrop – but I had another idea – use my laptop screen as a background.
I set up a variety of coloured layers in photoshop and flicked between the layers between each shot until I got one I thought worked.
I’m pretty happy with the results – what do you think?
Hopefully I’ll get that architecture shot tomorrow…
If you can’t wait until tomorrow, you can see more of my photography on flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/alantaylorphotography/
Alantaylorphotography's Blog 