Tag Archives: yellow

Flowers

Between showers

1 Comment
Yellow rose cover in raindrops, sidelit by the westering sun.
Yellow rose at golden hour.

A chance ray of sunlight lit this rose, making it pop from the surroundings.

Chiaroscuro

I continue my exploration of chiaroscuro.

This is a Renaissance painting using chiaroscuro:

Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew, 1599-1600
Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew, 1599-1600

Directional light

I took these photos yesterday between rain showers. One typical feature of chiaroscuro is the light coming from a specific direction. In this case the sky was a mix of dark clouds and blue, when the sun hit a break in the clouds it came between some nearby trees.

Detail in the bright areas

Another feature is that the brightly lit subjects have a lot of detail. Since I wanted detail in the highlights I chose what some would consider an under exposure (I used the P mode and set the exposure compensation to -0.3) and made sure the depth of field was great enough to get the whole flower. The settings were F 4.0, 1/320s and ISO 100 the focal length was 8.8 mm (24 mm 35 mm equivalent).

High contrast between the lit subject and the dark surroundings (a.k.a., tenebrism)

I used Raw Therapee to darken the shadows without loosing detail in the highlights.

Moving the photo into the GIMP, I made a duplicate layer of the image, switched the duplicate to multiply blend mode, adjusted its opacity then used a tone curve on the resulting image to fine tune the contrast.

For Jez’s Water, Water Everywhere and Cee’s Flower of the Day.

Flowers

Bee’s point of view

Image 14 Comments
Close-up of a honey bee on a sunflower. Another bee, on the edge of the photo, is flying in to join it.
I wonder what the bee sees.

Seeing things in black and white

Sometimes it is interesting to take a look at a picture without color to see what grabs your eye. I’m continuing my exploration of black and white. Never thought something that sounds so simple could be so complicated.

With color removed, a black and white of the image above allows the textures to really shine.

Does the black and white change your perspective of the photo?

For Becky of Winchester’s July Squares: perspective, and Cee’s Flower of the Day.