Spring Flower #4—Viloating Barry’s Rule

Today, I violate Barry Armer’s flower-blogging rule: “Only three flowers in a row.” Sorry, Barry.

After reading some of the comments from Tuesday’s blog, I changed my blog to address some of the comments that I received about my thought process. Now, here, I must say that according to Mrs. Patrick, I usually have little to no thought process—it is above my pay grade.

What am I thinking before I take a photograph? Well, it depends. But, in general, I am usually thinking about what drew me to the subject to begin with. Usually, what draws me to a subject is contrast (color, texture, etc), lighting, and just sheer impact of the subject matter. I find it easier to more-or-less “go with the flow.”

As example, in today’s photograph, I was drawn to the scene because of the color and the contrast between the softness of the azaleas and the hardness of the bricks and stone. As I studied the scene more closely, I knew that I wanted the filter light falling on the rock wall to be part of my image. But, I had a problem: there was more light falling on the wall than on the flowers, and the flowers had to be properly exposed. Solution: a little flash action. I directed a Nikon SB800 with a snoot to the group of flowers and another Nikon SB800 with a snoot to the single flower. I need the flashes to properly expose the flowers but I did not want any of the light spilling onto the wall.

I composed the image so that the wall acted as a leading line to the flowers and the light on the wall provided a little different color spectrum.

Enjoy.

Camera settings: Nikon D3, Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 at 200mm shot at ISO 200, f/11 and 1/30^th of a second (which was about 1-1/2 f-stops underexposed) with two Nikon SB800s with snoots pointed at flowers.

Post Processing:

Lightroom—Set black and white points, adjusted hue and saturation of various colors and added some mid-tone contrast to photo.

Photoshop—cloned out a few distracting elements in the foreground and around a few of the blooms.