In my quest to photograph spring’s first flowers, I found something I didn’t know existed. A four petal snow trillium.
Considered “rare” in Ohio, these small flowers only grow where dolomite/limestone outcrops exist. They are found in isolated, small groups and bloom for a short period of time in early March.
Investigating the four petal trillium after I returned from my shoot, I found that: yes, they do exist (nice to know I’m not seeing things); they are usually referred to as a quadillium or quadrillium; most have 8 stamens and 4 styles (the one I found has 7 and 3 respectively); like the four leaf clover they are considered very rare.
Specific Feedback and Self-Critique
I know that the photo posted has a lot of work to be done and really isn’t ready to be shared with the world, but given the ‘Weekly Challenge’ I thought I would at least share the oddity that I stumbled upon.
Please feel free to critique the photo I have posted. (I shot the photo with flower in the middle and the intention of cropping in post)
Technical Details
Canon 5D IV | ef100 Macro lens | f5.6 | 1/50s | ISO 100 | Tripod | Focusing Rail (28 shots)
Bridge; ACR; Photoshop; Zerene
I’m just starting to learn how to use Zerene. This is a P-Max file. After I created this file, I’ve learned more about Zerene. At some point I will run this through Zerene again. I’m thinking that I might give slabbing a try. I’ll defiantly use ‘retouching’ next time.
While there are a number of good YouTube videos for Zerene, I didn’t find anything that covered ‘projects’. I would like to know more about ‘projects’.
All Zerene tips are greatly appreciated.
I had never seen this before either, what a great find!
It’s interesting that they are only found in dolomite/limestone outcrops.
Thanks for the information and the image!
The texture in the petals is so nice and clear, of course being able to see that has a lot to do with nailing the exposure.
The composition is wonderful and since this is more or less a draft, I won’t pass on my thoughts for improvement, I think you already know what it might need.
Thanks, David and BTW, Wow, your photography has improved a lot in recent months! Well Done!
Edit: Sorry, I can’t offer any tips on stacking techniques, I have just started that journey within the last few days so not enough experience yet.
WOW!! Super find, with very nice capture and processing! Whites and tonalities in general look great. My eye goes to the tip of the leaf almost touching the top of the frame – a little burning there would work well.
I see some areas where stacking wasn’t perfect, and it never is, for me anyway. There is a hint of halo around the white petals, and that is very common for me – I don’t know why, but it’s always at white edges. I’ll almost always do both DMap and PMax and stack the two final images as layers and mask for the best of both. Give that a try and see how it works. Try very large values for the slider, so most of the image is black. I usually try several runs before I"m happy with it.
The very small leaf touching the petal toward the UR shows a bit of blur. I usually have to resort to cloning for small details like that. Also some blurring issue in the yellow center.
PS – not sure why you would resort to slabbing. You can stack hundreds of subs with no problem except for processing time.
I think you’ll have a very creative time finishing this image – it definitely deserves it!!
I have only seen snow trilliums at a horticulure garden at Michigan State University. They are only found in 3 counties in Michigan so I find them to be quite rare. And this one fits the rarest of the rare. Square comp comp works well and all other techs look good to me. Awesome photo…Jim
What a tingly moment for you! I can only imagine how excited you were when you realized that there was something different in front of you. The color and light you’ve chosen for this reminds me of classic botanical illustration. The goal of that form of documentation was twofold if I recall correctly - to show the true structure and life cycle of a plant, sometimes roots and all, but to do it in a beautiful and artful way. You’re getting there with this.
In terms of the stack, yeah, there are some haloes and overlap issues that could be addressed with retouching. That is an art in-and-of itself, but quite worth learning and exploring to make your photos work the way you want. My best results with Zerene and retouching have been to use a very clean DMap image as your target. To my eyes a good DMap has better color, fewer halos and a smoother background than a PMax. So I start with that and then choose a PMax image to fix any overlap issues or areas where the detail has become muddy or lost. It’s MUCH easier to do it this way than it is to clean up a PMax image. (rubs bruise from pounding my head against the wall)
The advantage of slabbing is in retouching as opposed to the initial stacking operation. I only use it if I see that my cleanest DMap will still need a lot of retouching and if I have, say, more than 30 source files. In my somewhat limited experience, it’s most useful when retouching on the DMap is going to take a whole bunch of source images because the details are so fine and the depth of the image is really deep. Usually that means having to sort through a whole bunch of source images to get the right one. That takes forever!!
Slabbing produces smaller PMax stacks (slabs) and using those rather than source images to retouch a DMap target image takes a lot less time because there are fewer of them to look through. I only do this if the PMax from all the source images looks weird or is too noisy. The benefit of slabbing is that you can edit the slabs in Lightroom to fix them for retouching or restacking. Mostly this involves noise reduction since the PMax process tends to add noise. Since you have to export and import slabs to Zerene again, it’s a no-brainer to edit them in the process.
Projects is something we’ll have to explore together. I have never saved a stacking job as a project and opened it up again later. I guess try it and see. From my reading on Zerene’s site, it’s simply that the interstitial TIFFs aren’t thrown away, but saved so you can work on them again. When I export from Lr to Zerene and then save the final images, the TIFFs are deleted. I think you’d probably run out of space eventually if you saved every project. I can’t remember how much the default drive space is for Zerene, but check that before you start saving projects with hundreds of TIFFs.
