The photographer has shared comprehensive information about their intent and creative vision for this image. Please examine the details and offer feedback on how they can most effectively realize their vision.
Self Critique
I’ve kept the background about as dark as it appeared when I shot it. I tend to like a very obscure background. I wonder if the darker blades of grass are distracting, or appealing? I like the way the flowers toward the back are fading out of focus.
Creative direction
Using a macro lens to accentuate the beauty of wildflowers and make them stand out from the background is one of my favorite things to do. These tiny flowers are really something to behold. I hope this image conveys the sense of wonder I feel while spending time with them.
Specific Feedback
Do you feel the way this moment made me feel? Do these flowers evoke the same emotions in you? I’m always open to any technical feed back on my images.
Technical Details
Nikon D850
Sigma 105mm macro
ISO 400, f/7.1, 1/40th
72 images stacked in Helicon Focus
I uses various masks in Lightroom Classic CC to enhance the flowers and obscure the background.
Description
Forget-Me-Not
With petals the shade of the sky on a lazy summer day and buds as pink as the hope of sunrise, these tiny flowers truly are unforgettable. They light up the forest floor like a galaxy of stars sprinkled across the night sky. They’re like specks of hope scattered across a blanket of green. I just love the way they waltz on the whim of the wind, silently dipping this way and that to a tune only they can hear. Occasionally, as I sat there and watched, they moved as if from within. I could not feel even the tiniest breeze, but there they were, dancing anyway. Forget you? I think not!
These must be blooming everywhere because I saw a ton on the banks of the river I kayaked this past week. Nearly stopped to shoot some, but from a boat it’s just too darn hard to do it well. This sort of floating bunch reminds me of the way I shot some Clintonia earlier this month. The post is here in Flora somewhere.
The bg is fine to me - the darker blades add some visual interest without stealing the eye away. I also love a smoothish background, but I don’t like them completely blank and featureless and this is a good compromise. Certainly with the sharpness and color difference in the subject it stands out just fine.
The focus fall off seems good in most spots, but the edges look smeary to me and I don’t know if it’s processing or just lens weirdness that caused it. The center of the flower group looks more natural to me in terms of how the focus goes from sharp to OOF. Some of it is the stack, but some looks to be Lr introduced. I’d have to see the stack without processing after to see what’s what.
The colors look spot on - I especially like the pink bud. the yellow centers are so great, aren’t they? I believe these are considered “naturalized” now instead of invasive as they had been for a long time, but I still get a little jolt of joy when I see them, especially in the big masses that grow on many river banks here in the Northwoods. I think it’s the unusual color that does that for us - I can’t think of any other flowers this shade of blue and of course their cheery profusion and attractiveness to tiny bees.
Here’s a jpeg created straight from the Tiff exported from Helicon. The breeze had them moving a bit so I used Mode C since the focus point was back and forth a bit, image to image. I manually cloned out some of the artifacts. There is a bit of a halo effect on a few blossoms due to that. There might be some Lightroom stuff to released to the masks I created as well. Typically I’ll do one mask for the subject and one for the background. It doest always nail it, and I may have missed a few areas while fixing it.
No problem, Paul, I’m happy to help and expect the same eyeballs on my shots, too. I use Zerene, but the haloing I see is a result of lens optics and stacking so there’s no getting around it. Subjects this deep cause it because a crisp element with an OOF element behind will always have the OOF part present in its slice of the stack and that’s basically the halo. I fix mine in Zerene if I can by using the retouching tools, but if they persist, Photoshop will do it with clone stamping, layering and various brush and layer styles and/or opacities. Helicon has retouching tools as well and you could see if they fix it for you before resorting to Ps.
Most people though, aren’t going to pick up on this, so it’s your own inner perfectionist and the intended audience that should dictate how “heroic”, to borrow the term from Diane, your post processing efforts need to be. Looking at the TIF you’ve got a good stack to work with and I really like how you brought out the color in the flowers.
Oh and I wanted to say that you don’t necessarily have to use all the photos you took if some are too out of line. Even if the stacking software doesn’t give you an error and tries to align them, if you can’t make it work, go through them for the outliers and just remove them from the process. I’ve done it a few times and gotten much cleaner stacks.
HI Paul, I really liked your image! I like the smooth background with the darker blades of grass, I think it adds interest. I like to shoot flowers with some being in focus and others fading out, so I think you did a very nice job here. I also like that little pink bud on the left side adding a small splash of color. I feel peaceful and calm when I view this image, good job!
