Orchid Macro

Deckard

Deckard

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Ben
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Fed up with the dismal light outside still, I thought I'd dig out my camera and grab a close up of our orchids as they're still in full bloom in the kitchen.


Orchid Macro by Pam & Ben, on Flickr

Used my old manual focus Sigma 50mm f/2.8 macro and lit by an SB-800 with Ray Flash ring flash adapter.

Not fine art, but felt the need to post at least something recently!
 
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Loving the colours and the composition of this!

I'd have liked the center to be slightly sharper - not sure if this is a focus issue or simply a lack of sharpening?

It also feels a tiny bit underexposed to me - the white looks a bit grey, probably only 1/2 a stop at most though.

Lovely detail in it though and the colours look nice and vibrant :)
 
Thanks for the feedback Gemma!

It's certainly sharper full size, I used "bicubic sharper" to resize but it still looks a little soft I'd agree. Oddly enough I did try an edit with an extra 1/2 a stop of compensation [I shoot in Raw], but it started losing the texture in the petals so settled with this as a compromise.
 
You're best to resize with standard "bicubic" and do sharpening separately - there are 2 main methods, the first being "unsharp mask" and the 2nd being high pass (which i'm now learning so can't give more detail on!), these allow you to control the sharpening amount though :)

White flowers are awful for exposing IMO, can be hard to get the white to the point of white with detail.

Edit:

Just had a play, say if you want me to remove :)

All I've done here is use auto curves in photoshop (sometimes useful) which has removed greyness but kept texture (I think by changing the underlying colours without actually changing
exposure), used levels to tweak contrast slightly and done sharpening (I used high pass but unsharp mask would work as well), not sure what you think? Edit again: Oh it's added a bit of noise but that's probably just working on a small JPG :)

flower.jpg
 
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