The cornflower photo is spectacular!!!

another entry





NIKON D300
f/36
1/15 sec
ISO ~ 200
Focal length ~ 180mm
tripod
mid morning ~ March 29 2020

This rose is Gruss An Aachen

Here is another submission for evaluation and suggestions:

another entry





Lady Banks Rose ~ Rosa banksiae

NIKON D300
Micro-Nikkor AF 70-180mm f/4.5-5.6D ED
f/36
1/100 sec
ISO ~ 200
110 mm

Date: March 29 2020 ~ noon

Tripod

Carol, I'm dying of curiosity--is this some kind of special effect and/or how are you getting these "floating" flowers???

I think it works best with the cornflower because it is more of a top down perspective and thus the mind's eye or the viewer's brain can put a hidden stem on that flower and it makes sense to the mind.

Anyway--it looks cool and I'd really like to know what the magic trick is!

dirtdorphins said:Carol, I'm dying of curiosity--is this some kind of special effect and/or how are you getting these "floating" flowers???

I think it works best with the cornflower because it is more of a top down perspective and thus the mind's eye or the viewer's brain can put a hidden stem on that flower and it makes sense to the mind.

Anyway--it looks cool and I'd really like to know what the magic trick is!

Dirt,
Thank you very much for your comments and questions. They will help me to learn, which I very much want to do.

My only camera is an iPhone 11 Pro, and I use only the Camera app to take photos. There are other apps that allow manual image capture, including raw images, but that would be way beyond my ability at present. This iPhone has three lenses: 0.5x, 1x and 2x. It can be used in Portrait mode, which provides a range of different depth of field settings between 1.4 and 16 that can be evaluated after image capture in the Photos app. So the desired image can be selected post-capture. I have used portrait mode for flowers, but the edges of the flowers usually look a bit strange to me (too soft) so lately I have been taking most of my photos in Photo mode, where the edges of the flowers look sharper and more normal to me.

But I love, love, LOVE soft and dreamy backgrounds like yours, evermorelawnless's, cliftoncat's, William's and others, so I have been blurring the backgrounds in an image processing app called Pixelmator Pro on my iMac by using layers and masks. For this I open the photo in Pixelmator Pro; it opens automatically as a layer. Then I select the subject flowers that I want to remain sharp-looking. Then I duplicate the layer and add a mask to the upper layer that shows the subject but blocks out (i.e., masks) the background. Then I make the upper layer (the one with the subject flowers untouched) invisible. Then I go to the lower layer and blur the whole image. Then I make both layers visible. When both layers are visible, the top layer, which has the sharp version of the subject flowers, sits on top of the blurred layer underneath, and that is the version I have uploaded here. (By the way, it took me forever to learn how to do this!)

Here is the starting image of the orange roses, followed by the version processed as described above:



And the cornflower before and after processing:

Hi Carol - Thanks for the info on Pixelmator Pro! I'll have to do some research on it!

Ann

AnnKNCalif said:Hi Carol - Thanks for the info on Pixelmator Pro! I'll have to do some research on it!

Ann

You can try Pixelmator Pro for free or buy it for $39.95 here:
https://www.pixelmator.com/pro...

Thanks Carol! I just took a look at it and wish I knew about this program when I was primarily using my old iPhone 8 all the time as my primary camera. I'm now just starting to learn Lightroom Classic CC which has been hard going at times but I'm slowly figuring it out after watching some YouTube videos.

Ann

Here's another image where in prior years the background shrubs would have detracted from the main subject. This rose is called James Galway and is known for its ruffled petals which I tried to capture.



I shot this photo hand held with a Fujifilm X-T3, 80mm (120 mm full frame equivalent), auto ISO 160, auto shutter 1/900, manual aperture control at f/4 with ⅓ exposure control reduction. The photo was taken 11:20AM so the rose in the center is facing almost directly at the sun which reminded me of how in Japanese flower arrangement class we had to position the main stem of the arrangement with the same recognition of where the sun was when the stem was cut.

This spray of roses is sitting atop a shrub which is about 4ft tall and I'm 5ft tall with a macro lens (LOL) so I had to stand back a few feet and on top of a low raised bed to take the photo. The spray fills the frame so this pic needed minimal cropping in Lightroom Classic CC.

Ann

Lovely photo, Ann! That's the kind of dreamy blurred background I want in my photos.

Thanks Carol! I guess it might be easier to create the blurry background or bokeh in camera with the right lens and settings.

Recently I tried a 16mm, f/1.4 lens that I didn't buy but would love to have. It produced "cat's eye" type of bokeh. I'm not completely sure I like it for rose or flower photography because it could be distracting but I only took this one photo so I need to know more about how it works!



This lens lets you get very close to the subject but it's actually a wide angle lens and much lighter than my 80mm macro. I don't have to keep backing up from the subject to take the photo and get the dreamy background.



There's so much to know about everything!

Ann

AnnKNCalif said:Thanks Carol! I guess it might be easier to create the blurry background or bokeh in camera with the right lens and settings.

Recently I tried a 16mm, f/1.4 lens that I didn't buy but would love to have. It produced "cat's eye" type of bokeh. I'm not completely sure I like it for rose or flower photography because it could be distracting but I only took this one photo so I need to know more about how it works!



This lens lets you get very close to the subject but it's actually a wide angle lens and much lighter than my 80mm macro. I don't have to keep backing up from the subject to take the photo and get the dreamy background.



There's so much to know about everything!

Ann

You can create bokeh backgrounds as layers in Pixelmator Pro and customize them quite a bit. I have played around with this feature, but I have not created any backgrounds that I like. I am not used to the look of cat's eye bokeh yet. It still looks a bit strange and artificial to me, even in your first image. I am still stuck on the dreamy blurred backgrounds.

I liked this one that I took today. The background sorta goes with the yarrow.

Lovely, GrammaChar, and the dreamy blurred background behind the yarrow somehow helps to draw my eye to the flowers. But also the positioning of the flowers in the field of view seems to be obeying some important rules of photography (thirds or golden ratio?), and that too probably contributes to the loveliness of the image.

That was a very nice critique, Carol.

I'm hesitant to add my three shots, because they are just standard point and shoot photos with my Panasonic digital camera. But it was fun looking through a few thousand garden photos to narrow it down to three possibilities.









And I thought I'd just add that we have mostly double rainbows up here, and last month, this one showed up. I just can't resist trying to capture their magic!



Thank you, William for this interesting Thread. The technical talk is way over my head, but the photos are so interesting to see.

Nora, those are very nice! And that rainbow is stunning

I get intimidated somewhat too with the technical talk, but just reading what others have written helps me to understand it a little better.

I get intimidated because of the beautiful photos of others!