Had a bouquet of these which were in various states of bloom. When the 'Transitions II' challenge came up I immediately thought of trying something that showed bud-to-bloom. I originally envisioned three flowers lined up left-to-right progressing from bud to slightly open bloom to bloomed ... kind of a floral "home erectus".
Unfortunately, many of the blooms are bound to a single stem ... which is great for visually tying them together as part of the challenge theme, but none had all three stages. Luckily, this one had a full bloom and new bud, so damning the "compose using odd numbers" rule, I went with what I had. Note the nearly square composition to make up for the use of an even number. ;-)
Set up on a construction table with full northern light to the right, then used bounce flash (-1 1/3 FEC, 12' ceiling). That's it.
Post processing was equally straight forward: RAW conversion using ACR (minor tweaks) then in PS CS3 I flipped horizontally so the bud would be on the left (couldn't get it to stay in that position when shooting, so shot with the flower on the left knowing I could just flip it), boosted blacks using Selective Color adjustment layer, to fully blacken the background, slight boost to saturation (+10, Master) then very mild Smart Sharpen (200% @ 0.3 radius). Resized per challenge requirements, added very subtle frame, convert to 8-bit sRGB ... save as jpeg.
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