Wood Poppy

[Ed Vatza]

From Saturday at Bowman's Hill Wildflower Preserve (New Hope, PA).

Canon 30D; Sigma 150mm Macro lens; Canon 430 EX Flash w/ LumiQuest Softbox on Flexible Flash Bracket; tripod-mounted.

1/50 sec @ f/14; ISO 640; 0 EV; FEC -1

[Bruce Murden]

Ed, I like the comp and your great job getting yellow-on-yellow detail in the stamens, and the nice little touch of the LR petal turned up like a turning page.

At first glance, I think the pink or purple BG to right of the bloom center distracts me as an out of place hot spot and I'd prefer the BG to be shades of green. Let's see what our colleagues think!

[Anita Bower]

I agree with Bruce.

[Julie Kenward]

Okay, time to really step out of our comfort zones and learn something new!

I saw this great thread on BPN today where someone's yellows in a bird image came out hot - way too hot. Ed's poppy definitely isn't in this catagory but...yellows and reds are the two colors that digital cameras love to over saturate. I was reading the thread today and remembered seeing this image and wondered what would happen if I tried some of the things they talked about in the thread located here:

http://www.birdphotographers.net/for...109#post251109

I highly suggest everyone go and read this thread...it's going to be invaluable to you at some point and these beautiful yellow wildflowers are a great place to start.

Ed, I opened your image up in CS4 and opened a levels adjustment. If you look at the histogram you can see there is clipping on the far left side - and, according to this thread, you can hold down the alt key and touch your mouse to the slider on the far left and it will show the color that is clipped. It's yellow in this case.

I read down the thread some more and it said that because yellow is the complimentary color of blue, you can apply a blue filter and that will pull back the clipping on the yellow. I did that...I opened a layer adjustment with a blue filter set at 21% and you can immediately see where what looked like perfectly normal yellow now appears to be a little hot - some of the details really start to come out when you throw that blue filter over the image.

I then opened a levels adjustment layer and moved the middle slider to the .91 mark. Both the white and black sliders are still clipped at this point but look at the difference in the image...it's subtle but it's there - less muddiness to the yellows and a bit more detail especially in the stamen area.

[Ed Vatza]

Never too old to learn, Jules. I gave it a quick glance and will go back to study it in more detail a little later. Right now I am listening to the new CD from Leonard Cohen. :cool:

[Anita Bower]

Jules: Thanks for the link. It looks like an excellent tutorial.

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Ed,
Nice job on the comp and Jules did bring up the details. I also agree with Bruce on the BG. Now for a color wheel lesson. Adding the contrasting color will help the details out. Pay special attention to the secondary colors of the wheel. Adding that color to the opposite will minimize it's impact; http://www.color-chart.org/color-wheel.php