The quote is by James Henry Leigh Hunt (October 19, 1784 - August 28, 1859, an English essayist and writer), although I suspect he was talking about the white arum lily. Lilies found by accident when walking in Henley during after a coffee with a colleague on the opening day of the regatta.
Inspiration here was a kind of art nouveau feel, where the arts and crafts movement had pushed towards the use of natural objects and the art nouveau movement seemed to me to push this into a different place.
Taken in the kitchen with the vase and lilies on a chair, the black background (art mounting board with a mauve pearlised piece of paper blu-tacked to it) lying at an angle below and behind the vase and the camera mounted high above the vase and flowers and accessed by a pair of step ladders.
Post processing:
* noise ninja
* rotated 1 degree counter clockwise
* shadows and highlight pass
* separated flowers, backdrop and background into three separate layers
- curves on background layer
- curves and hue/sat on backdrop layer
- levels, selective colour on flower layer
* cropped
* re-size
* flatten image
* add in frame (4 pixel black, 2 pixel green from picture, 4 pixel black on each edge)
* two passes noise ninja
* usm
* save for web
Statistics
Place: 70 out of 375 Avg (all users): 6.0945 Avg (commenters): 6.9412 Avg (participants): 5.9496 Avg (non-participants): 6.4194 Views since voting: 1661 Views during voting: 302 Votes: 201 Comments: 21 Favorites: 2 (view)
Hello! Congratulations on your nice placement in the Flower challenge. This is, of course, a striking image, and immediately engendered strong emotions from your commentors.
Technically, and compositionally, in my opinion, it's just fine. sure it's bold and the colors almost hurt, but that's what you wanted and that's what you achieved. I very much like the way you made the stems cross on the two lilies. That added an extra thoughtful touch to the image.
I will point out that the lighting on the lavender background is very slightly uneven (but you knew that) and the flowers have a slight indication of oversharpening, at least on my monitor. But those are pickings of nits, and just something to do to keep my fingers occupied while on the keyboard.
In any event, nice image, and I'm very pleased to have the chance to examine it more closely.
Carl - great finish in a very tough challenge, and a new pic on your top row, too! Very unique and lovely presentation - and in reading your notes, took a lot of work, too.
3 - The lilies are beautiful, however in my opinion this beauty gets lost in your choice of background(s), framing, lighting and the reflection off the glass/vase. The concept of squeezing them into the neck of the vase/bottle/glass could work, but it looks too harsh and 'stiff' as is. Again, the choice of both colors in the background as well as shapes, coupled with the hard framing, detracts overall from the potential in this shot, in my opinion. A variation in angle/perspective and lighting, would also likely have helped.
The lilies are very pretty but I am not sure about that purple square in the background. I think the image would have been stronger with an all black background.
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