The Making of a Macro
I spent the weekend with Jens’ family in Eppstein and had hours to wander around his mother’s lovely garden. This one little purple flower caught my eye because of the translucence of its petals: you could almost see the yellow center glowing through. This was the first shot I took, probably from knee-height:
Nothing too inspiring there, but you can get an idea of what the flower looked like. I got closer and focused more on the base of the flower, with the petals going out. I tried a few times, with this one being the best:
Now, it just so happens that I took a lot of photos that day and needed the card space, so I went through all the photos to delete the ones that were terrible. While I scrolled past this set, I was struck with A Realization regarding the composition: the base of the flower and the petals weren’t the important components, the black space was! The negative space, as it were. I wholeheartedly subscribe to the photo that it’s only small things like this – the positioning of that black space – that take a photo from so-so to great. Luckily only a few minutes had passed, and the light was still right and the flower was only 15 feet away, so I went to shoot it again and got the shot I wanted:
I normally have all my camera settings set to “boring” – almost no contrast, no saturation, no sharpness, no noise reduction, etc. I like to do all of that in post-processing. This photo above looks boring, certainly, so the first thing I did was increase the contrast, increase the exposure, and increase the blacks:
Finally, I added some split-toning because for whatever reason, the original periwinkle just wasn’t appealing to me. Also, the petals are the kind that shimmer, and I wanted to bring that out. So I made the last few adjustments, and ended up with this:
No assessment of this shot would be complete without a shot of what I look like when I’m taking this kind of shot. I only own about three pairs of pants that don’t have faint stains at the knees, and it has become second nature to roll up the shirt sleeves before planting my elbows in the mud. Because this is the way I take most of these shots (thanks to Jens for letting me link to his shot): http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3362/3438919457_b28632f177.jpg
