Fuchsias

Images taken in a controlled environment or with a posed subject. All subject types.

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OzRay
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Post by OzRay »

Fuchias are great subjects, unfortunately I've only ever taken them with one shot, it prints up pretty good at 17"x22" (the max I can do).

Image

Image

Cheers

Ray

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

Very nice, Ray!

As Admin, I've split these gorgeous images off into their own thread. The rationale for that is explained in the Posting Guidelines.

For continuity, I'll include HERE a link back to elf's thread about his fuchsia.

--Rik

OzRay
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Post by OzRay »

OK, I think I've got my act together now.

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

I think you had your act together before. These little glitches are very common with new members, especially since conventions here are different than on a lot of forums.

You make nice images -- I hope to see a lot more. :D

--Rik

elf
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Post by elf »

OzRay wrote:Fuchias are great subjects, unfortunately I've only ever taken them with one shot, it prints up pretty good at 17"x22" (the max I can do).
Better watch out, Betty might see how you spelled it :)

Nice shots, fuchsias ( I copied and pasted it from Betty's post just to make sure:)) are hard to capture because of the long sepals. It's almost impossible to get the front edge of the sepals and the petals in focus at the same time. You've done a good job with these. The colors really pop. What lighting did you use? What post-processing techniques?

OzRay
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Post by OzRay »

elf wrote:
OzRay wrote:Fuchias are great subjects, unfortunately I've only ever taken them with one shot, it prints up pretty good at 17"x22" (the max I can do).
Better watch out, Betty might see how you spelled it :)

Nice shots, fuchsias ( I copied and pasted it from Betty's post just to make sure:)) are hard to capture because of the long sepals. It's almost impossible to get the front edge of the sepals and the petals in focus at the same time. You've done a good job with these. The colors really pop. What lighting did you use? What post-processing techniques?
Learning something all the time. I never knew I was spelling it incorrectly. I hope Betty forgives me if she sees this. O:)

I used a black foamcore board and held the stem of the 'Fuchsia' with one of those all-in-one clamp/magnifier stands used for soldering. I used natural window light that was coming in from the right and added some fill with a white foamcore board from the left.

The shot was done in RAW and then processed to TIFF in Capture One (I now use Lightroom). I converted to 16 bit TIFF first, as I wanted to make a print later on, so therefore prefer to work on TIFF and then convert to JPG for screen use. I adjusted the RAW file to bring out more detail in the white part of the flower and that just followed through to the rest and then I gave it a little boost in saturation to bring out the intensity of the colours (this pretty much is what the real colours of the flower were, but it depends on the colour adjustment of your monitor as to what you see).

The background was splotchy, as the foamcore didn't go entirely black, so I used the magic wand in Paint Shop Pro (wish I'd had PS then) to outline the flower and then made the background fully black. It's possible to get the background black with careful lighting, but the natural lighting was so good and I didn't want to go building a light (or dark) box to shield the other ambient light.

I also touched up a little of the green leaf above the flower, as there were fine cobwebs on it, which I didn't notice until I started the post-processing. And that's about it. The Fuchsia came from our garden and I'm hoping to get another near perfect example to work on again. This time I want to try some other types of backgrounds to give the flower a more 'natural' look.

I've done several large prints of this (17"x22") and the results are even better than on screen.
Last edited by OzRay on Sat Aug 15, 2009 3:02 am, edited 1 time in total.

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

Great description -- many thanks for the details!

--Rik

Aynia
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Post by Aynia »

Great photos. :D

I saw them yesterday in the other thread, but didn't comment!! :?

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