The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
Trying to get recent stuff organized (and culled) and came across this one that I had stacked but not done more with. It is a shoot done early the next morning after the previous post:
Wind was calm the next morning, it was still in the shade and there was some dew. I managed to get the camera on the ground for a look almost up into the drooping blossom on a short stem.
Specific Feedback
All comments welcome! Itâs a bit of a static âportraitâ but looking up into the bloom gave me a nearby tree for a BG. Anything else handy would have been very distracting.
Technical Details
Focus stack in Zerene. This one had fewer overlap artifacts than usual to clean up. Some BG cleanup with 50% opacity cloning.
Critique Template
Use of the template is optional, but it can help spark ideas.
Love the composition and you know I cannot resist a dewey flower! Love how tiny the drops are! I wonder if they might show up more with a little reduction in highlights? I find that sometimes enhances the look of the dew drops.
I saw a few Glacier Lilyâs here over the weekend, but snow overnight and more in a day or two will delay them a bit. Your photo makes me happy! Thank you!
Thanks, @Paul_Holdorf â like minds for sure! Unfortunately I had deleted the raw source files after doing the stack, and canât go back to recover more highlight detail. Shooting in the shade didnât help. I think a good idea for a flower with highlights like this it to hold a diffuser very close, so it acts both as a diffuser and offers some soft fill light. Maybe in the first few minutes of the sun just grazing thisâŠ??? Stand by till next year!
I found a black and white umbrella at Home Depot. Itâs got wide alternating stripes of each color. Itâs pretty big, big enough to lay on its side and shelter the flower and camera from rain, but I have also found it really seems to balance the light when its just a little too bright. It does make it difficult to traipse through the woods with it sticking way out of my backpack. Iâve been rejected by more than one low tree branch!
Quite lovely. We have carpets of trout lily in the yard, but itâs been mostly windy and full sun so I donât have anything decent, and certainly no dew. Thunderstorms moving in now, so no chance today either. But itâs ok, I have yours to keep me company.
Beautiful job on the stack, Diane and I love the dew. The lighting and background are superb. I might quibble a bit with the composition as I love the gentle curve of the stems of these flowers and a little more might make a more graceful composition for my personal taste.
Beautiful subject. Now I am beginning to understand my problem with stacking. How many frames were in this stack? I think what has been bothering me are those overlapping artifacts. Do you see them at the margins of the subject? What causes them? Do you have focus bracketing in your camera?
Thanks, @Kris_Smith, @Dennis_Plank and @Barbara_Djordjevic! @Paul_Holdorf, look online for collapsible photography diffusers. As a bonus, they can be fitted with silver and gold reflectors over the diffusion screen. The light becomes almost magic when you hold the diffuser very close to the subject.
Dennis, I quite agree on the composition and hope to do better next year. The leaves are beautiful but I havenât found a good composition with the droopy flowers and the unattractive bark on the ground. This one is a big crop from a vertical and an OOF flower and leaf spoiled the bottom part. Cut off most and cloned the rest.
Barbara, the camera does have focus bracketing. I never keep track of the number in a stack, but it is often 15 or more for a single flower. I use ESP to set the interval â usually very closely spaced. The camera will then calculate the appropriate steps from the aperture. In LR I delete the frames that started ahead of the closest point and those that went too far.
Smaller apertures will give sharper focus over a larger area on each frame and minimize the overlap artifacts, but the aperture is often dictated by the need for a softer BG.
With Zerene there are two algorithms â DMap and PMax. I usually do both and stack the resulting TIFFs in PS and mask to the best of each. DMap usually gives fewer overlap issues and PMax, especially with white flowers leaves a dark halo around the petals. Where to set the slider in DMap feels like a case for ESP.
The overlap artifacts are where a near object has the most overlap with one behind, and it leaves a strange smear that can extend into the BG a bit. It can probably be minimized by better knowledge of setting the slider. But it is just fundamentally limited by the amount of OOF halo. A smaller aperture helps.
