Spider Chrysanthemum

Beautifully done!

Awesome shot. Unique and artistic. What flower is this?

Wonderful colors!

This is an incredible picture. The color gradient is wonderful.

It stood out from every other photo on the page because of its color and movement.

Beautiful photo. I love macro photos and this just inspires me to work harder at it!

 

VERY nice Leslie...

Sensational colors...and inspiring a dynamic interpretation. Good job!

Absolutely stunning close-up ! Colorful and dynamic ! Congratulations, Leslie, for this picture of the week ! Well deserved !

At first I thought this was an anemonea in an underwater image. Amazing how you've transformed this beautifuly saturated color image so that the original subject is not immediately discernable. This is just what I love about photography. What you think you see, may not really be what you get!

Nature IS wonderful and you have wonderfully capture one of the proofs. Everything is sooo awesome: colours, textures, composition, shadows and highlights

 

Congratulation on a well deserved POW.

Thanks, Elvish Ones, for turning this into a POW. The credit really goes to the flower, and to the Canon digicams I picked up over the last few months. My immediate impression was that digital workflow makes photography easier. The photos don't (necessarily) get better, but decent photos are easier to crank out.

(Parenthetically, I should say that for me my best photos are those along the lines of http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=1208362 or those in the 9/11 folder notable failures in the ratings game.)

This particular shot is a reprise of http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=1413013, done with a Canon G2 P&S.I posted the photos first in Qiang Li's Photocritique Forum, where I added some notes about that digital ease-of-use issue. Here's what I said. First, anent the less colorful G2 shot:

Of course I'm glad folks like these photos, but I want to emphasize what I've said before about still lifes with digicams: they're easy. Believe me, I don't mean this as a sly easy-for-me-but-hard-for-you pat on my own back. It really is easy to make perfectly good, even striking, flower photos like this once you have a Canon G2 or equivalent.

The flower I simply bought at the supermarket. Put it in a vase. Put the vase on a chair in a room full of windows. Propped a yellow board against the back of the chair. Screwed a close-up lens onto the G2, put the G2 on a tripod, and focused in close till the result looked good on the camera's LCD display. Took the photo in AV mode at the smallest aperture (f/8) for DOF. Tried all the three focus points in case one gave better focus than the others. Tried setting exposure compensation up a bit, since the first try was a trifle dark. (Used the histogram display after each shot to judge overall light/dark cast.) That's it. I took the photo at the camera's highest JPG resolution, so was able to load it directly into Photoshop, where nothing but a little USM and Auto Levels was necessary.

You too can do all that. The photo's pretty, but has no special merit beyond the colors dyed into the flower, and the prettiness of the flower itself, and the minuscule cleverness involved in using a colored background. A nice calendar or postcard shot at best.

Next day I posted the more colorful version with these tech notes:

To continue my comment from yesterday's shot, this is the same flower (or possibly another in the same bunch they're almost identical) done with the D30 rather than the G2. This wasn't such an easy shot as the first one, and did involve more sneakiness on my part. Also it shows off, I think, an important difference between the P&S G2 and the DSLR D30.

Speaking to the last point first, the D30's sensor has fewer pixels than the G2's, but each pixel is much bigger. Therefore the D30's capable of subtler and smoother rendition of color and tones without noise and with that subtly unctuous look I think of as "digital." As for the ease of making the shot, this one took more doing, not in a physical sense but in accumulating and marshaling experience, the one thing I have in good quantity. (Hey, sometimes quantity can substitute for quality, as in the case of a 300-pound wrestler.) Look at yesterday's shot and you'll see that there's more color in the flower than that simple close-up can show. The tubular petals have a kind of translucence, and the fact that they're hollow suggests they'd look quite different under diffuse but direct light. (The first photo uses indirect daylight.) It's a given that photographs bring out colors we don't normally see, since our eyes (or rather the brain they're a part of) adapt and adjust. Blue snow shadows are the classic example.

It seemed to me that the flower needed to be photographed again under direct light. I set the white point to "tungsten" and used the overhead light in the bathroom, going to the D30 and a true macro lens (rather than the G2's close-up accessory). I picked a composition that shows off the colors as they run their rainbow gamut from the big outer petals to the tiny inner ones. As a raw file the image is dull, but I could tell that the D30 did in fact catch the translucence of the smaller petals and the shadows that show they're tubular, with those charming organ-pipe mouths.

OK, I admit it's not a stroke of inspiration on the order of Weston's pepper or Cartier-Bresson's "Brailowsky," but it did take more craft, or at least craftiness, than yesterday's G2 photo. The point, I guess, being that with modern (digital) cameras it's very easy to make a photo that's technically good and esthetically satisfying, of the postcard or frame-on-the-table variety, but that there's still a role for the "art" (or craft) that gives photos more pizazz.

Apologies for tacking this self-indulgent note onto a POW. I know that in a deep sense the tackle and gear of any art are "just" or "merely" or "only" the means to an end, but what the hell. I'm glad I went digital and thought I'd say why.

Leslie--

 

I appreciate the down-to-earth attitude. It's quite refreshing in contrast to some big egos seen around here. The colors on the shot are spectacular. I have little else to add to what others have said. Keep them coming!

When first looking at visually striking images that just assault you with color, the first thing I do is convert it to monochrome to see if the composition will stand on its own without the rainbow.

 

In this case, I think it does. This certainly seems more carefully composed than just pointing a camera at the flower and shooting, and the photographers instinct for composition might just have him composing unconciously. This image doesn't pass musetr if the petal tubes are horizontal or vertical in the frame. It is the diagonal composition that creates the energy. Also, the way the density of the tubes radiates out is very nice. There is also a lot of detail here.

 

While flower macros are not my typical beverage of choice, to me, this is one of the finest flower macros on the site.

my complaint about the choice of this image is: "what does it say?" the idea of flower

macros as abstract images is hardly inventive. I just don't see this image as anything

other than pretty.

 

I largely agree with the photographer about her feelings about her pics. I like her

Meat series a lot more. I think this image:

 

http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=1208362

 

says a lot in an unexpected manner. i believe its one of the most original images on

the site. i feel like too many of these images get overlooked for praise and discussion

Grabs you hard, one of the best I have ever seen, as perfect as you can hope for.

Flower macros aren't particularly my bag either, but this truly is amongst the best of the breed. And though there may not be some "profound" communication going on here, what is wrong with a photo being merely "pretty". I too tend to prefer photos that are loaded with meaning, but I also appreciate a photo that can let you sit back and go "ahhh". This one does that for me. Congratulations Leslie.

 

P.S. I'll third Marcelo's comment.

congrats leslie, #2 huh. i enjoy your photography immensely. i do regret your decision to lower your standards to the D30 level. sure this image can be appreciated here on screen, but how well would it stand up as a print, next to say a 4x5 or Medium format or even a well shot 35mm cousin. if we are now accreditting sololy the idea, so be it, but photography is about the print not the scrint. sure ive seen some decent prints from digital cameras. ive made some in the past. but driving a car backwards never made since to me, you can go so much faster with more resolution. somebody give leslie 8gs so he can get a 1ds.

Great shot. And I say that without reservation. Though I appreciate photography that "says something," and Leslie has proven himself adept at that style, not all photography has to be deep in some intellectual way. Besides which, is it just possible that a macro of a flower can say something, too? [if you, personally, do not find deep meaning here, that is, of course, just fine.]

 

Reserving the right to offer more pithy comment about the image later, I will note that a) Leslie, in addition to being a talented photographer, happens to be a man, and b) it would perhaps be better if the elves stayed away from strong comparatives in their descriptions, since they tend to get folks riled up unnecessarily. The may be "one of the most outstanding macros [they] have seen," but to call it such invites comparison needlessly. It is a great macro shot, catching attention through color but offering much greater reward than simply intense color through its compositional flow and energy.

 

Enjoy.

Thanks, all, and right on to Matt K. and Will W. This is a strictly-for-pretty photo. I did a series of them during the war as a kind of escape. But I value the pretty-bad photos more. (At least I'm often told they're pretty bad. Probably my most notorious example is "Mister Bun". On your lunch hour? Don't look.)

The D30's fine. Naturally I'd rather have a 6mp (or 11mp!) DSLR, but the difference is mostly just a matter of how big a print you can make. I seldom print above 6.8 x 10.3" (2000P constraints), and the D30 does that perfectly well. A D60 or 10D would give me a 1.42 (square root of two) linear advantage, bringing the size up to 9.8 x 14.6" or, at a stretch, to 12 x 18". We'll see what turns up as the year goes on; at the moment I'm suffering from weakness of the wallet.

Michael Reichmann, mainspring of luminous-landscape.com, published what was then a heretical opinion when the D30 hit the market he felt that DSLR's produced better prints of a given size than their pixel count seemed to promise. Accumulating evidence has borne him out. For facts and figures, see this article by Miles Hecker.

Marshall G.'s kind comment is welcome, but I deny that any of my photos has deep meaning, or any meaning at all. I'm better at deep sinking than deep thinking.

Marshall's right about my gender, though I doubt the difference between his and hers is as important as folks believe. In any case, there's no insult in mistaking me for a lady. Ladies are OK. I've been married to one for thirty-odd years. (Some very odd, but never mind.)

Will wrote, "i do regret your decision to lower your standards to the D30 level. sure this image can be appreciated here on screen, but how well would it stand up as a print, next to say a 4x5 or Medium format or even a well shot 35mm.."

 

All in time Will. Digital technology is growing leaps and bounds. Soon, the traditional format photographers, who have not experimented with digital, will be left scratching their heads and wondering what happened to film.

 

Fantastic macro Leslie. The composition is dynamic and far off the "beaten-to-death" path of flower macros.

Not likely in our lifetime Rick. Unless you know something that noone else knows.

im so happy this is photo of the week, its absolutely beautiful!!! ill gladly quit going to my bookmarked gallery to sign in and go to the photo.net homepage to sign in for this week :-D ...its very inspiring and pleasing, and i was so happy to see something with so much color :)

I'm still trying to pick my jaw up off the floor as I write this comment. Given the immense number of flower macros I see around these days, its extremely hard for me to get really jazzed about them when I see them. But this is something altogether different. The color and depth of the image is so stunning. I'm all the more in awe given that there is no PS manipulation going on here. It just goes to show that if you assemble all the elements in just the right way, you can create new realities without physical changing a thing in the subject you're photographing. Wonderful work Leslie and richly deserved POW.