Pictures and a Treat

Photo of the Day

Part of the fun of making pictures lately has been doing things to control my own destiny. This past spring we planted a garden that I knew would give me some good shots. The thing that I have been waiting on is the sunflowers to open up. They did this past  week so I took the camera to the garden to get some shots. The garden is at my wife’s work so I don’t have the luxury of having it in my own backyard, but it is still close. The sunflowers of course are the twelve foot variety so I had to shoot up to get them in the frame. The way that they grew though gave me this unique stacking view of the sunflowers. There was a unopened flower in the way of the main flower here, but a simple move of the hand gets it out of the way. I may have a couple more pictures from the garden before it is all over. The even better news is that I may also get some sunflower seeds out of the deal.

Technical Data

This situation had a very wide range of light. I wanted to show the beautiful sky as well and the inner workings of this sunflower that was in the shade. Had I been fully prepared on the scene I would have used a flash. In the future I will try that to give a dramatic effect. Here though without a flash I had to use HDR to bring everything into the scene. I shot three shots bracketed at -2, 0, and +2 with my camera. I then ran the photos through Photomatix Pro to fuse them together. I was shooting handheld on a day with some wind so I had to wait until the wind died down as well as stay very still. I didn’t know if it would work that well, but I lucked out here. When the program had given me a 32 bit file to preview I saved the TIFF file, and opened it up in Lightroom. I love how the sliders in Lightroom can really bring all of the details out of this file. I massaged the sliders a bit to get what I wanted, and the photo was ready to go.  As crazy as it sounds I have done this enough now that this is a quick process.