SO....I had a voice lesson Saturday. It was later than usual and the city was a mess from having gotten more snow than was expected on top of a layer of frozen rain and sleet that froze and walking around was a real pain. A 5-7 minute walk from my voice teacher's to the florists took a half hour or so...well I took pics for about 10 minutes, so really 20 minutes. Shoveled walks interspersed with unshoveled walks, the longest being a CITY RECREATIONAL CENTER that was practically the length of a block and the end of the block was cut off by a van stuck in a garage....oy....then more shoveled and un shoveled than a house being redone blocking the middle of the next block causing me to go over plowed mounds of snow and across the street to more plowed mounds of snow....and then to the end of the block close to my destination that was blocked by two large people just standing there and taking up the entire cleared area they were standing on....it was just a mess. I went into the 7-11, got some money, bought some stuff and went across the street to my florist Michael at Pure Design.......
....and then I walked in and I saw them....but it was the end of winter and almost spring....these are late summer or fall flowers....it could not be! So I asked Michael...'What are those?'....and he smiled, nodded and said rather coyly, as I recall...or maybe rather knowlingly...cause he knows I LOVE THEM...."Dahlias"....and I was still in a state of disbelief....so I said, "What?"....and he repeated "Dahlias" and I almost literally started to cry...well not really, I ain't quite that sensitive, but I faked it real loud...no one else in the store so it did not matter. So there you have it. NEVER expected it and I think Michael may have my shopping pattern down cause he sort of "knew" I would be in . SO I bought five and a few other things and then Michael gave me a spray of orchids off a dead orchid plant and a couple of other flowers as well.
So here are three of the dahlias. I lit them with three flashlights. They are all the same coloration in the same light but the back flower was lit with a regular incandescent light and the two front flowers were each lit with a small white LED lights. I un-raveled a wire hanger, straigtened it and put it length wise over a piece of poster board to hang the regular flash light. I had some long pipe cleaners. I punched holes with scissors in the poster board and put a pipe cleaner through and knotted it. Then I attached another pipe cleaner to it and then wrapped the bottom of the pipe cleaner around one of the small LED flashlights and positioned it to light one of the other two flowers.Then repeated the pipe cleaner LED light process for the other flower. The background is a large piece of green construction paper. I darkened the room and shot the flowers with just the three flashlights as light. Had the camera on tripod and used the manual remote and a pre-set white balance.
Post: Convert from raw in PSElements 3.0 with a +0.33 exposure compensation. Layer adjustments for levels, brightness/contrast and hue/saturation. Layer of curves adjustment. Sharpen. Crop. Resize. Sharpen.
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Place: 11 out of 159 Avg (all users): 6.6425 Avg (commenters): 7.7500 Avg (participants): 6.3469 Avg (non-participants): 6.7342 Views since voting: 1976 Views during voting: 339 Votes: 207 Comments: 21 Favorites: 1 (view)
I LOVE what you do with your flowers. I don't think I have ever seen anything quite like it. They are so full of colour and so nicely lit, I want to stick them in vases and put them on display in my house. Simply stunning.
I love how the flowers glow, especially the top one which seems like a flame. Nice composition, good clarity, I'm only slightly disappointed by the green in the middle, I'm wondering if it could be less focussed or maybe a bit dimmer (or maybe I just don't like the shade of green). Nevertheless a high score from me. Good luck!
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