A few backyard flowers

Cracker

I've been enjoying using flowers in my backyard as subjects to practice my photography, they can be very cooperative when wind is absent.


A pink rose





Birds of Paradise





Pink Lilly



And the little California Poppy patch is in my neighbors yard

bfjr

Nice colors
really like the Bird of Paradise & the Lizard

BBiggs

Wow I really like these! But thats no lizard, its a turtle

dbaker1221

well done

RogersDA

Very nice captures here.

Could use a tad more saturation on the rose (which should give a bit more contrast when you convert to B&W, too).

Cracker

Thank you bfjr,, BBiggs, dbaker1221 and RogersDA, I'm glad you like them, and I very much appreciate your encouragement and advice. I will try and bump up the contrast in the pink rose image and re-try the B&W conversion. I had a feeling the image lacked something, but I struggled to put a finger on it, and now I clearly see lack of contrast. Thank you!! I need to find and take some Photoshop classes somewhere.

BBiggs, you're right, it is a turtle. My other hobby is making collectable realistic bugs and stuff for fly fishermen, as well as occasionally for movie studios. Here's a link to how I created the baby red-eared turtle.
http://http://www.solarexpert.com/fishing/fly-tying/tying-realistic-red-ear-turtle.html


I bought my D200 and 105 macro to simply take better photos of my art, but latley, I'd rather be outdoors shooting beautiful things, instead of making bugs. I've bought a number of other Nikon lenses in the past year, and I just hope, that if I expire unexpectedly, my wife will not sell my camera gear for what I told her it cost...lol..

Cheers,
Graham

RogersDA

Cracker wrote:

Thank you bfjr,, BBiggs, dbaker1221 and RogersDA, I'm glad you like them, and I very much appreciate your encouragement and advice. I will try and bump up the contrast in the pink rose image and re-try the B&W conversion. I had a feeling the image lacked something, but I struggled to put a finger on it, and now I clearly see lack of contrast. Thank you!! I need to find and take some Photoshop classes somewhere.

It's not hard to add a bit of contrast to an image. The first is your image. The second image is two layers in Photoshop. The original background and a duplicate of the background. The blending mode of the duplicate is set to "multiply". I then used a large, soft burning tool brush to add some additional contrast to some edges. Typically the brush is set for a Range being either Shadows or Highlights and the exposure being about 25%. This allows the brush to subtlety change the image with each stroke. A larger, soft brush makes the edge transition almost disappear with the background image.

This next example image is three layers using the Orton effect for a bit of artsy look and feel. Duplicate the background layer and set the blend mode to "screen". Duplicate this second layer and set its blend mode to "multiply". Add a Gaussian blur to the third layer (I use a radius 5.8 in this example). I flattened/merged the layers and then used a large, soft burning tool brush to add some additional contrast to some edges.

Cracker

I can't thank you enough David, What a magnificent improvement!!!

I have printed both the original pink and B&W images on my R1800 printer, and neither image looked nice enough to frame. I love both of your transformations and this beautiful flower finally looks good enough to print and be admired by others. I'll be busy practicing your techniques later today on the full size images.

Thank you again!!!

Graham

Maestro

Extremely beautiful images with wonderful composition. Wow, just wow! If I could only do that with flowers and plants. thumbbowbow

Jack'll do

I love the Birds of Paradise and the pink lilly. The colors are wonderul.