Lily Leaf

[Bruce Murden]

Found this backlit beauty in Greenville, SC's Falls Park, a lovely city park right downtown, through which the Reedy River runs and where you will find the Reedy River Falls. While waiting for better lighting for the falls, I wandered the park admiring and photographing the flora around. To retain the backlighting, I declined using my on-camera flash (all I had at the time) to allow for a faster shutter speed, so I didn't want to small an aperture (lost more sharpness when I stopped down further, and ISO 400 is my comfortable limit for noise on my camera).

Don't know what type of lily this is -- no blooms, but it resembles large decorative lilies. Full leaf is ~ 16 in / 40 cm long.

Nikon D80, Nikkor 105mm, ISO 400, f/11, 1/13s, tripod
processing in LR, cloning & sharpening in PS

[Julie Kenward]

Looks a lot like the canna lily leaves we have here only ours tend to be more of a dark green - they have that same pattern of colors running through them, though.

Bruce, I love the bright but not overly saturated colors on this. I also like that you put it on a diagonal with the main stem running from/to opposite corners. I think you got the sharpness on the stem where you get the most detail so good choice there as well.

My one suggestion would be to take a look at the ULC - it almost looks like you have some vignetting going on there. It seems a little darker in that top corner and down the upper left side of the frame - you might be able to reduce that in pp.

Very nice! Very colorful!

[Harold Davis]

reminds me of salt water taffy! love the colors and the way you composed the vein to run through the frame.

[Mike Moats]

Hey Bruce, great looking subject, fantasic colors and lines. I like the angle on the stem. Looks soft at the edges and dont understand your mention of losing sharpness when stoping down, you're only at f/11 and have lots more f/stops to work with and shouldn't be losing sharpness.

[Gordon Craig]

I like the colors and the curls at the bottom. I don't know how windy it was but I believe if the f/stop was more in the range of F/22 you would have had more sharpness in the upper left hand side of the picture.

[Bruce Murden]

Sorry to leave out the detail.... just enough leaf movement that stopping down gave too slow a shutterspeed in early evening, and didn't have the SB800 to get good fill flash. f/22 just wasn't cutting it.

[Mike Moats]

Ahh now we understand better.Thanks.