White Magnolia

[Anita Bower]

My husband took me to Bryn Mawr College, where he works, to see the flowering trees, and they were just perfect. I liked the backlighting on this Magnolia blossom.

Nikon D300, Sigma 105mm macro, f 5, 1/640, ISO 250, tripod, Live View focusing, manual exposure.
PP: PS7: levels, color balance, slight crop, gaussian blur for a few areas, gradient tool. Topaz Adjust >exposure color stretch, Topaz Detail >feature enhancement, DeNoise. Sounds like a lot, but the changes were minor.

[Mark T Helm]

A sure sign of spring, the flowers are just swelling now with a little more warm weather maybe this week.

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Anita,
I'm a huge fan of backlighting.....so that works for me. I do wonder if you toned the exposure down a bit more would that make for an even more dramatic presentation??/......something for you to explore. I thought the BG would bother me more but I find I like it quite a bit.....although smoothing the one whiter blob around 5:30 and the horizontal branch would take this up yet another notch.
Backlighting is tough out in the field so I think you handled it nicely!

[Norm Dulak]

Hi Anita.

I like this image as it is. But I wonder if you couldn't bring out a bit more definition in the whites with Photoshop Shadows and Highlights. And if the image were mine, I might also make a more square crop, eliminating the oof horizontal branch at the bottom and fixing the already-mentioned lighter blob.

But a good effort for that lighting situation. And a most worthy subject for your camera.

[Mitch Haimov]

Nice backlit image, Anita. I do find the angled branch in LR a little distracting, but it's soft enough that it is a minor point. My initial thought was that you could blur the BG, but then I started thinking about what you could do with this image and all your texture layer tricks. Perhaps applying interesting texture(s) but masking the subject could be interesting. Just an idea--I've never played with such techniques, but you use them quite effectively. Seems heading down that path could present a wealth of possibilities (with out without masking) for an image such as this. The left-most petal seems a bit soft, but this is also a minor point as there is not a lot of detail in the petals anyway so it doesn't particularly stand out. :S3: The bright, low-detail petals do suit the mood of this image.

[Anita Bower]

Thank you all for the comments, encouragements and suggestions. I tried a more square crop, but prefer the OP crop. I did clone out the horizontal branch. I will not play around with textures--good suggestion. :S3:

[Steve Maxson]

Hi Anita. I like the comp, as presented, though I agree with cloning the horizontal branch and the light "blob" near the bottom. Though you note that you did some nr, I might suggest some additional nr just on the background to smooth it out a bit more. :S3:

[Ken Childs]

Hi Aita,

My thoughts on this are very similar to Roman's..... nice work with backlighting but maybe just a touch too bright. When I looked the the thumbnail, I didn't think I'd like the BG but overall it looks pretty good in the larger image. A few tweaks have been mentioned for improving that BG and I agree with smoothing out the lower part and running more NR on just the BG. Well done!