I shot this image in the front yard using some light painting during a long exposure at dusk. The exposure was f/22 for 30 seconds. The red was painted by waving a laser pointer across the tops of the thyme. The blue foreground light comes from a novelty pen with a blue light. I chose dusk to allow the red and blue light to build up better during a long exposure.
Post-processing:
- Curves to boost lightness, contrast and color saturation.
Some red-lit areas were too hot. So I masked those by duping the red channel and hiking the contrast. Then I used that mask with "Apply Image" to bring the blue channel in at 50% Darken. This brought some detail back into the overly red leaf tips.
-Masked the pruners and used a separate set of curves to lighten and enhance saturation moreso than the rest of the image.
- Cloned out some hot reflections on the pruners, and a distracting dead twig I didn't notice when taking the shot.
- Selective sharpening on the pruner and the lichen covered rock.
- Dodge & Burn to bring out the lichen, and some of the plant matter toward the upper right, and to softly darken the edges.
- Gaussian blur of the background to help narrow the depth of field.
- Added a border.
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Wonderful image. I showed it to my wife and she felt you had pasted the clipper into the photo. We looked at it way blown up and if so, you did a great job. I concluded it is a straight up shot, well executed, and well titled. Colors, focus, DOF and composition are very nice. Good luck.
The shears look a bit out of place with them just stuck in the ground and no hand holding them. Lots of nice color, but little on the detail. This shot looks to me more of a gardening photograph rather than a botanical one.
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