A couple of years ago I was delighted to find this cactus in an accessible yard in town. I had to watch the blooms developing in order to be there before sunrise on the day one would open, as they bloom at night and fold up shortly after sunrise. And by sunrise there would be bees all over them and enough breeze starting to spoil a focus stack. The effort paid off and I did have good success several mornings.
Specific Feedback Requested
All comments welcome!
Technical Details
Is this a composite: Yes
Canon 1DX2, Canon 100-400 at 220, f/8, ISO 400, 1/20 sec. Minor tonal adjustments in LR, to maximize detail in the whites. Stack of about 10-12, processed in Zerene. Parts of the BG were a suburban scene and were replaced with a texture.
Hi Diane, nice to see you here again. This is an awesome image of a beautiful flower. Wow. Nice work waiting for just the right time. Also, great work with the focus stack and nice touch adding a texture to the background. I think it works well and doesn’t look forced in. Great job with the masking.
I downloaded the image and did a crop from the left to eliminate the far cactus, and then a bit from the bottom. It seemed to give the flower some room to breathe into the frame. Although one could say it changed the balance of the scene. Anyway it was fun to play around. And your image is a real winner.
Thanks @David_Bostock – I’ve surfaced again after a deep dive into deleting and reorganizing to relieve the load on backup drives and an overburdened LR catalog. (Which, of course, I’ll just re-load again…) I almost did that crop from the left, so it has 1.5 votes now!
Diane, I’m thoroughly enjoying the cactus stems and flower. The details in the bloom’s center are outstanding. The colors and shapes in the background fit well, but I’m not a fan of the texture, but that’s just me. My experience with LR classic is that it slows down when I exceed around 7000 shots, so I start new catalogues. It’s reasonably fast switching from one catalog to another. All of the images are on one external disk, occasionally copied to a second external disk for backup safety.
All the essentials of the flower and the body of the plant are there. The inclusion of three stems - I’m not sure what the term is for the body of the cactus on the far left is critical to the balance.
And then there’s the background. Gorgeous, in a subtle, restrained manner. I’m curious as to
[quote=“Diane_Miller, post:1, topic:23847”]
Parts of the BG were a suburban scene and were replaced with a texture.
[/quote] what they were.
I like the frame selection. Is the software picking up the background texture and adding that to the frame? Or, is that your decision?
Either way, it adds considerably to the whole of the presentation.
Thanks everyone! @Mark_Seaver, did you drop a decimal – do you start a new catalogue every 7,000 images? I have about 175,000 in my main catalog, and was thinking about splitting it when someone, I think on the Lightroom Forum, said LR could easily handle more than that. It is convenient to have them all accessible in the same catalog.
@paul_g_wiegman, here’s the original. This one wasn’t as bad as another one I was thinking of, where I had to deal with a suburban intersection with a stop sign and part of a house and street – peeking out from behind the thorns, which I wanted to keep. After a while I got smart and cajoled a friend to get up early enough to photograph these wonderful things – and hold a large piece of cardboard to block the BGs. The texture file was larger than the image frame and I did the frame by simply expanding the canvas size, which revealed it over a white BG.
Diane, I do mean 7000. I keep separate catalogues for every year, with each year broken down by day, with a couple of keywords in the name to help me when I go back. I also create smart collections on specific subjects/catagories. Those speed the process of finding things and keeping the catalogue below 10K images speeds things up noticeably in terms of loading images or old catalogues.
This latest view looks very good. I would suggest burning-in the background (something that the texture seemed to do “naturally”, ) to let that lovely flower stand out.
@Diane_Miller Thanks for the explanation. Just so I’m clear, the background color and texture is from the cardboard, or was the cardboard replaced with a texture from Photoshop?
I’m really a rookie with Photoshop, not because I don’t find it useful, but I’ve been too lazy to devote time to fully understand how to use even the most basic of the myriad of features. Maybe it’s time to learn.
I added a layer that was the texture (a scan of handmade art paper), then put it in a blend mode to overlay the original BG, and masked out over the flower and cactus.
Love everything about this one Diane including the dropped in background, I think it adds artistically to the story. You definitely had to plan this shoot to capture this image. The flower is beautiful and in pristine condition. Well done Diane.
Thank you for posting the original image. Your final edit is wonderful. There are beautiful textures within the flower itself. The creative background really works well for the cactus, both in the texture and the colour.
) to let that lovely flower stand out.