Critique Style Requested: Standard
The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
One of my favorite wildflowers, but one I don’t catch blooming all that often. It’s sometimes called Pipsissewa and is a member of the Wintergreen family. I haven’t photographed it blooming since I lived in NH so I was VERY excited to see it on the side of the trail going out to Lasalle Falls. Its scientific name comes from the Greek - cheima = winter, phelein “to love” because its leaves are always green. I suspect the tiny bug is a springtail.
The second shows the whole plant and also a bud. It’s a 2-image stack. The first image is a 54-image stack done in Zerene and using slabbing to make retouching much easier. The wind was hellacious when I shot this so I had to crank the ISO to get a shutter speed that would get all the shots done in the shortest amount of time.
Specific Feedback
So I probably shouldn’t have gone that high, but I wasn’t paying too much attention while I waited for the air to still. Details still ok? Stack look ok? I have a few conjunction issues due to how lens optics work and did the best I could to mitigate them and other things that come up with stacking.
Technical Details
Tripod
Lr to run denoise AI on all 54 shots (omg my fans came on during a couple batches) then tweaked wb, sharpening, texture, clarity & did some basic luminosity management.
Zerene for the stack - slabbed both DMap and PMax, stacked the slabs and used the DMap as my base image; sourced both the PMax slab stack and DMap slabs for retouching. Painstaking, but I think it came out ok.
Photoshop for some clone stamping, dodging and burning and a Soft Pop action in the TK8 panel.
The full plant photo didn’t need nearly as much work and was only two images. Basically the same drill with some junk removed in Ps and a slight bg blur.
Glad both photos work. I thought if I only posted the full plant photo people would want to see the odd little umbels up close so I added that one, too.