Wild Azaleas

These are all over the mountains at the moment in Korea (almost all of them pink). I saw this pair yesterday in afternoon backlight, and liked how the flowers’ structure was partially revealed.

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I wasn’t going to lug my tripod for an hour up a very steep hill for stacking - so I closed the shutter instead. Did I get away with this?

Technical Details

Is this a composite: No
D500 + 105mm macro f20 1/800 ISO 1000

Selected the flowers and raised Shadows and lowered Highlights in PS. Some BG darkening in TLC.Sharpened with Topaz Sharpen.

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Hi Mike, excellent. Hand held at f/20, the DOF looks just fine to me. Nicely done.

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Mike, the lighting is quite striking and lovely. Your dof choice looks good. Getting the petals and the long sepals and stamen sharp in a single shot is always a challenge with the wild Azaleas. While there’s lots of advice about diffraction degrading sharpness at setting above f/22, I’ve done real life testing and can’t see any difference until I get to f/22 and even then, it’s only seen when viewing at 100%, so unless you’re planning to make a huge print, diffraction is not a “real world” worry. The local wild Azaleas won’t bloom for another month to 6 weeks.

You did pretty well with this difficult situation. The exposure looks really good as does the focus. I wish the outermost stamens were perfectly symmetrical, but that’s just my OCD showing. The layered effect the backlighting produced is really pleasing. Very 3D and sort of X-ray at the same time if you know what I mean.

Wild rhodies don’t grow up here in any profusion. I think we have some bog laurel or maybe a few stray rhodora, but not much in the way of laurels. I miss them.