Re-composition - Make It Simple

by

  Wanda Krack

Sometimes my camera goes to work with me as we have some nice plants and blooming flowers from time to time. There is a bed of Shasta Daisies in one of the inner court-yards that have lovely blossoms in the late spring. This May/June, I was taking photos around 07:30 am, after the hours of my duty, and I noticed the lovely blue sky toward the southwest, opposite the rising sun. The flower-bed was still in shadows, so I thought of trying to capture the blossoms with the blue sky as the background. In order to do this, I would have to shoot up through the flowers, from their bottom sides. Luckily I have a camera with a swivel LCD, so holding the camera down and shooting from beneath the blossoms, I could still see what the picture was looking like. I did have a difficult time getting the angle high enough to not capture some of the building and surrounding foliage. As you can tell from this first photo, the original picture was not at all impressive. As a matter of fact, I didn't really consider this photo a possible good picture until several months later when I was reviewing some previous CD's. Here is the original: As you can tell in the original, the building and some foliage was in the background. However, the sky was a nice blue, which was reflected in the petals, and the daisies were almost dancing! Before submitting, I cropped, re-touched a few small areas (cloned) to remove some spots and imperfections in the blossoms, and I attempted to lighten the back of each of the blossom heads in ps. Instead of bringing out the details in the dark areas, there was suddenly a reflection of the yellow centers, which I decided to leave. There was some more stray foliage to remove, and the very top of the building, and presto, I have a cleaned-up image of these dancing flowers! Here is the photo as posted in POTY: Knowing I needed to convert this landscape format to a portrait format, I went back to the original photo, and cropped, using portrait form. Then, removing the background, using the paintbrush and clone tools in ps, that left the lovely flowers and stems in front of the blue sky, which was my original intention. One thing I tried this time was the fill-flash, selectively, on the dark areas, and much to my surprise, I finally obtained some details in the bottom part of the blossoms. Here is the final results: The camera and settings used were: Nikon 8800 with VR (vibration reduction) on, Resolution: 3264X2448, ISO 50, F7.1, and 1/111's speed. The information tells me I used a flash, but I question this as the bottoms were so dark, but, I have a short memory and take many photos!! Surprisingly, the copy in the portrait format took top numbers in a recent competition at my local camera club, and, best of all, daughter Windy wants an enlargment for her bedroom (which turned out quite nicely as a poster-sized photo). So, a picture that started out as a simple experiment....not looking like a winner......turned out to be something of value. The lesson: Don't be afraid to "loose sight of the shore"!! This is the simple story of a simple photograph. Thank you for your reading my ramblings!