I put the flower in a pie pan which was filled with water. I lined the bottom of it with light colored paper since the pan had a boring gray color to it. The stem is still attached to the flower and is held in place by a small clamp that the flower petals hide. This allowed me to get a good DOF. I used my Giotto air blower to create some ripples in the water to give the background some texture.
In post I did the usual stuff plus several runs of Photoshop's noise reduction filter to give it that extra smooth look.
*Post*
Thanks for the comments, votes and favs. This did better than I thought. I figured it would be too processed to do any better than 6.2. As Robert mentioned, I probably should have made this a square crop. I think the reason I didn't do it is so many of my entries are square crops and that's getting a little old.
Btw, this wasn't my original choice for an entry this week. I was going to enter Transitions but I wasn't happy with the way that shot came out as it was rushed so I went with this instead.
Shot for Transitions:
Statistics
Place: 6 out of 394 Avg (all users): 6.6211 Avg (commenters): 7.7500 Avg (participants): 6.5190 Avg (non-participants): 6.7195 Views since voting: 2266 Views during voting: 246 Votes: 161 Comments: 23 Favorites: 7 (view)
Really nice tonalities, really nice bordering. To my eyes, however, you've given too much picture area tot he BG; I want the flower to be more prominent, so I can glory in every detail of it. When I expand this to 600 horizontal (which would mean a squarish crop) it works MUCH better for me.
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