I was just messing around with my camera, taking some pictures of flowers at the house. My wife likes orchids, and we have a bunch in bloom right now. I didn't try to pose anything, just snapped shots as they were arranged on the patio, one here, one there, not really thinking about light, etc. I was even using the telephoto lens, so wasn't expecting much. But I got this one that I think was a happy accident .....
Sony a77ii, Tamron 150-600, 560mm, f6.3, 1/1250 at ISO 1600 (handheld)
I was shooting into my patio, blocked from the sun, but the background is not black so I'm not sure how that background color happened. I did have the camera on Auto ISO. This is the full frame, no crop. I did use PS CC to clean up a few small blemishes on the petals and then ran through Nik DFine to clean up some of the noise. No changes in anything else. I tried playing with LR sliders, but really like it just the way I caught it.
I hope you can give me some C&C on how I could have made this picture better. FYI, there are about 5-6 blossoms on the stem of this orchid. I just caught these three the way I did. I could possibly try to re-construct this pic anew if you folks think it could be done better.
It's a nice idea and fun the play with things like this. Orchids are always a great subject and you got nice whites here. In this case, with the two flowers that show centers being dominant, I'd go vertical and try to get both in the plane of focus. You don't want to cut the bottom one in two.
Telephoto "macro" is challenging with the limited DOF, but that can be used to advantage with a little practice. It's hard to isolate one or a few flowers on an orchid stem without having other blossoms in the way.
If the three orchids are more fanned out, I would love the horizontal composition here. Wendy has a similar composition in the OOTB forum here. I think that composition is gorgeous. In general I would like to see the flowers a tad brighter without blowing out the subtle details in the petal. But white flower on black background is exquisite, AP. I hope you will experiment with this! I would love to see more of this flower work from you :)
Very nice indeed AP! I would look for flowers with at least a bit of separation. The colour looks right, but I think some of the petals have lost their detail. If I were to crop this image I would take a slather off the RHS to make a strong diagonal.
I enjoy looking at this photograph. Ditto what Glennie wrote about the RHS. Big fan of your dark background. I've played a bit with flash and a stopped down aperture to get something similar. TFS.
Accidental Orchid Blossoms
