Flowers and Tombstones

ginger_55

USAIR

Ginger
Great shots very nicely done
Great color

Thanks
Fred

jwear

lovely light Jeff

rutt

Great compositions. Profound subject. Very nice light and muted colors.

Hard to improve, but maybe just the right sharpening?

JamesJWeg

clap

I love shooting old grave yards, one of my favorite subjects.

James.

ginger_55

Thanks, Fred, Jeff, Rutt and James. I love that area. It is part of the many acres that are Magnolia Gardens. Fortunately the cemetery is near where the birds are right now.

That area has lovely spring flowers, some more formal, some very casual like this and in other areas. I was happy to have gotten a photo of some of the lovely flowers we have this time of year. And I have not seen the cemetery in years, so that was a treat. It is still used. The family, servants, slaves, etc are all buried there, if they wanted to be. I think only a part of it is cleared.

I was hoping to get a photo for the Challenge, not to win, just a fun photo, but the flashlight was out of batteries. Bill went to see if there were some in the car, but I got scared and called him back. We may go again next weekend, depending on the weather. Does anyone know how to make a ghostly light?

ginger

rutt

On the DD thread, you did some LAB curving of another shot from this series.

Here is the original:



And your final version:



Looks better, not so muddy, but I think you can do better. For one thing, I think you skewed the color balance so that the tombstone is not so natural. And unlike the daffodils which I played with last night, this shot needs to have more contrast in both directions. It's lightest spots aren't light enough and it's darkest spots aren't dark enough. What about this:

ginger_55

by ginger
I agree with you, Rutt, but I played around to try to make it a bit softer. It was getting darker which would make the contrast less. But more importantly, I like the tombstones softer. Some were soft naturally and some were a godaweful mix of black on grey. With this I used the recipe above, used the saturation, mostly to tone down the yellow (I am not awefully fond of yellow green either). I was going to then finish with the USM, but I duplicated it and played some more.

I made a duplicate layer G blur, then a gradient grey/white overlay (both blended with soft light) I used a radial blend on the soft light on this one. It darkened the leaves around the tombstone a bit. Both of the soft light blends were reduced in opacity with the slider. I have to live with it over night to see how I like it. g

gubbs

Ginge, the lighting and colours are gorgeous. How is it going with the new camera??