Nature Photography - Irises
Flowers are great photographic subjects. Cheap, easy to get hold of, available all year round. Lots of colour, texture and structure to play with. Oh, and scent.
Scent? Are you mad? How can you get scent into a photograph?
Easy. It's all in the mood and the lighting. When you're thinking about taking creative pictures of flowers you don't simply want a record shot. You want to try and put across what it is about the particular flower that gives it its particular appeal.
Irises for example. Nice subjects to work with because of their colour, and certainly their structure. Think also about their other name. Flags.
Oh, like flapping in the breeze and all that.
Quite. When you look at their petals and the contrast between those and the rigid stems you can quite easily see how you could bring out that 'flag' quality.
So, here's a bunch of them. You can look at them separately, as a group, or concentrate on details that make them interesting to look at. That purple colour. What sort of scent does that suggest?
But irises don't have much scent.
Maybe But you can suggest that they do, either in the way you use depth of field to soften the colour around a central focal point, or using lighting to bring out the rich colour and texture. You can use tools in your photo manipulation software to play with the meaning you're putting across too, by bringing out the saturation in a petal and desaturating the surrounding area slightly. You're just using your senses to put across the ideas you're trying to convey.
Taste? Yuk.
Alright, four senses. Three in fact since they don't talk much. OK let's look at the flag thing. Away you go.
Iris 1
Canon EOS 300D
1/320 @ f4.5 DISO 100 18-55mm @ 35mm
Tumax DSL20Afn Speedlite flash
Gaussian layer at 30% added in Photoshop Elements and erased in patches over the irises to give a sense of movement. Another solid colour layer added and erased to give dark border then given a Gaussian layer at 20% to blur.
Get a load of that then. It's a bit different isn't it.
Ooo that's nice. The petals look like material billowing out from the main stem don't they. Nice composition too, with the flag blowing into the negative space on the left, and nice sense of movement with that selective blurring around the flowers. And the fact that you've got some muslin behind them makes the whole thing seem very airy and light. Perfect for putting that idea across. Gives a narrative to the picture.
Narrative? What, like a story?
Exactly. You've not only got a picture of an iris, but you're suggesting an idea behind it. Giving it context and tying it in with the idea of them being flags.
Now let's look at the structure of the flowers. You don't want to just stick a flower in a vase and show its shape. You want the flower to reveal itself. You want to be able to bring out some of its magic, and to make someone really look at how it's made.
Iris 2
Canon EOS 300D
1/320 @ f5 DISO 100 18-55mm @ 38mm
Tumax DSL20Afn Speedlite flash
Omni light added in Photoshop Elements to darken the rest of the picture and to bring out the centre of the flower and the delicacy texture of the petals.
I'm getting the hang of this. Pretty neat aren't they, irises.
That works well. Using that Omni light has focused the viewer's attention on the way the flower opens up and on the delicacy of its petals - like tissue paper in that pic. And the Omni light darkens the rest of the picture of course, which adds to the effect of pulling attention to where you want it to be.
OK now we're going for scent.
This I've got to see.
Well you're doing it.
OK. Let's have a go.
Iris 3
Canon EOS 300D
1/320 @ f4.5 DISO 100 18-55mm @ 34mm
Tumax DSL20Afn Speedlite flash
Image cropped right in on flower. Layer at 20% less light in levels and parts of petals erased to bring out colour. Layers flattened. Saturation increased by 10% and then yellow desaturated separately at 10% otherwise it's too bright in comparison. Canvas size increased by 2 pixels length and width for inner black border, increased by 100 pixels with white as background colour, then thin 1 pixel black border applied.
Coo. Pretty vivid. That's definitely mauve.
Now that works. You've homed right in on the flower and intensified the colour slightly, and then enhanced it even more by giving it a white border so you exaggerate the effect of the extra colour.
Nice set of iris pictures there, and you've brought out three elements of the flower rather than just going for the straight shot of a bunch of flowers. Much more creative, and imaginative use of digital tools to complement them.
Just letting your imagination go can give you a nice set of ideas that you can use to explore anything.
Return to the Help Centre
Nature Photography - Irises
|
