Blue-eyed Grass

What do you think?

I think its great. The composition is supurb, lighting is soft, and colors are vivid. AJM

 

Everyone has one or types of pictures that gets them steamed up about all being the same. For me it's flowers. So it is totally out of character to say the following

 

I like. I Like it a lot. The soft colours and the way the flowers are seperated from the background. Gives it a painting effect (the subtle signature helps. - OTHERS TAKE NOTE SUBTLE IS GOOD ditto the frame.)

 

It doesn't matter, but I'm curious how much is light and depth of focus, and how much is software after the fact.

 

Muted tones and colors work well with this simple composition. Nice work!

I use a technique I used a lot in underwater photography, it is close-focus-wide-angle technique. I'm shooting with a 19mm (35mm equiv) lens on a nikon coolpix 5000. One of the odd qualities of this lens (or fancy diopter) is that depth of field extends into the lens in very close focus.

Each open flower here is smaller than a dime Maybe half a dime, 1-2cm. This is a flowering grass so you are looking at 3-4 blades of grass. I recall that the camera is on the ground shooting up a little bit.

When I shoot wildflowers here in Central Texas I spend a lot of time walking very slowly and looking down for subjects. Some of the most interesting flowers I have seen are very small and practically unnoticable. I have been fascinated by this flower as it is fairly common but the natural variation of blue color, and especially, saturation of color varies a lot.

This example is a good way to feature the value that a rotating lcd display can provide. If I had shot this with a SLR I would have been laying flat on the ground with my eye in a 90 degree viewfinder and crushing a number of other very worthy photographic subjects. I set a manual focus for very close...in this case I can take the egde of the flower up to the edge of the lens and then work on composition. I shot this in early evening...say 1-2 hours before sunset in April of 2003.

Ah! manipulation. First let me say that I white balance frequently when shooting flowers and will do a few grey card shots to make sure I have good color when I get back to the digital darkroom. There is a little additional manipulation. There are some basic curves tweeks here. There is some additional selective unsharpen masking, but I can't do much as I have this as an appox. 12x18 inch print and the depth-of-field is so thin here. I have made many different prints of this image using added saturation (awful) more unsharpen mask (awfully noisy). I've actually spend most of my time on this print in desaturating and removing noise from the top-right area where the background and sky merge.

This print has sold a couple times and it brings in the money at charity auctions where most of my work is sold / given away :-)

Nice color combination and composition ! I'd eliminate the small flower at top left because IMO leads the eye out of the main subject... Kind regards,