Tech Info: Single exposure with Nikon D300s using 70-300mm @300mm , f/5.6 at ISO 400 for 1/1500 sec.
I don’t fancy flowers that much and the only real time when I used them was while dating my wife and now to cool her down. But off late I’ve seen quite a lot of blooms all over the place and even a guy like me can’t resist to take a shot at one or two.
This was taken right in front our apartment complex. There are quite a bunch of them on roadside pavements all over the city. During mid afternoon is when these guys are at their best, petals spread wide open and catching all the sun they can get. As the sun goes down, so do the petals of these flowers and by night time, they really look like dead and dried flowers.
About this shot
It was a straight forward one. Used a wide open aperture (f/5.6) to get a shallow depth of field, in other words – a shallow dept of field will just throw the background (or foreground) out-of-focus. Spot metered the flower to make sure that I get its exposure right with a dark background and since it was quite windy, bumped up the ISO to 400 for achieving a shutter speed of 1/1500 of second.
Processing
While composing the shot itself, I made sure there was some space to the left of the flower as I wanted the flower to be on right. Due to the wind, an adjacent flower’s petal was in the frame. Didn’t realize it at the time of the shot, so in post, had to crop just enough to get it out of the frame. A simple curves adjustment to get some contrast between the flower and its background and a high-pass filter sharpening to finish it off for displaying on the web.
Note: I’ve quite a lot of flower shots taken during our camping trip, so will process them in the coming days and get them out of the system 🙂