Tag Archives: Flora

Abstract Fun

Colorado Blue Spruce Abstract 1

Sometimes it is just fun to play around with images.  I knew that I would use various ways of post processing when I first took the image.  Here is one version.  Playing around a little more, I came up with the following abstract :

Colorado Blue Spruce Abstract 2

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Head On

Colorado Blue Spruce Tip – New Growth

As I was walking around my yard, I was just looking for images to pop into my sight.  I have photographed new growth on evergreens more times than I can imagine.  However, I have never made an image on new growth taken from a head on perspective. A tip of new growth from a Colorado Blue Spruce just jumped out in front of my eyes. So I looked around more to try to get one that was the most symmetrical.  My mind started to think what I could do with this from an abstract point of view.  I plan to apply some creative alternatives in a future post.

Like my friend John Barclay (www.johnbarclayphotography.com) emphasizes.  Do not force a photograph, let the image come to you.  This one did …

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Yakima Arboretum Early Spring IR

160406_Yakima ArboretumCanon XT-IR, Tamron 18-270mm @ 65mm, f/11, 1/500 sec, ISO 400

Cherry trees are in bloom and brilliant green leaves are emerging at the Yakima Arboretum.  It is a great time to get out my old IR converted Canon Rebel XT and try out some IR imagery.  It was a beautiful spring day and I had a little time in the middle of the day to get out and explore.  I chose to work in B&W using Infrared.  The Arboretum was showing its early spring pink and white blooms of the cherries and pears as well as a few trees with emerging brilliant light green leaves.  Tomorrow I will go again with my normal camera.

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More Fallen Cherry Blossoms – New Perspectives

150513_More Fallen Cherry Blossoms-1 by Karl Graf. Canon 5D MkII, EF24-70mm f/2.8L @ 60mm, f/11, 1/20 sec, ISO 200

Fallen cherry blossoms covered the ground beneath the trees.  I was able to get a few images before the lawn mowing gang cut the grass and swept away the beautiful blooms.  The past few weeks are typically my favorite weeks in the garden each year.  For a few days we are lucky to have the flowering pears, flowering plum, flowering crab apple, and flowering cherries all in bloom at the same time. It is peaceful and beautiful in the garden.

The image below is a new perspective using multiple exposures while zooming out.

150513_More Fallen Cherry Blossoms-2 by Karl Graf.

A different look is achieved by a long exposure and a zoom pan as seen below.

150513_More Fallen Cherry Blossoms-3 by Karl Graf.

Which one catches your eye?  I like them all.

 

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Fallen Cherry Blossoms – A Different Perspective

150512_Fallen Cherry Blossoms_ME2-2 by Karl Graf.

Impressionistic Cherry Blossoms.

I was having a lot of fun creating multiple exposures and just experimenting with various artistic ways of processing images when I came up with this combination.  I first started out taking individual images of fallen cherry blossoms.  I then experimented with multiple exposures (5 exposures in this case).  I then further experimented with different artistic presets in Topaz Impression (Georgia O’Keefe II) to arrive at this image.

For reference, below is the 5 image multiple exposure:

150512_Fallen Cherry Blossoms_ME1 by Karl Graf. Canon 5D MkIII, EF24-70mm f/2.8L @ 70mm, f/8, 1/30 sec, ISO 200 (5 exposures)

Lesson Learned:  Enjoy experimenting, you can never tell what you can come up with!

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Buddies

150422_Yellow & White Daffodils by Karl G. Graf. Canon 7D MkII, EF 100mm f/2.8 IS Macro @ f/8.0, 1/640 sec, ISO 400

As I was coming in from my morning shoot of our garden, I saw these two blooms intermingled in a clump of white and yellow daffodils.  They reminded me of two close friends , one whispering in the other’s ear.

I cannot recall how many times that I have been getting ready to put my camera away for the shoot when that one last image pops up in front of me.  It seems to be one of my most alert times.  On multiple occasions, this last image is my select from the whole shoot.

Lesson Learned:  Always be ready for the image to come to you!

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Japanese Maple Buds

150418_Japanese Maple Leaf Buds by Karl G. Graf. Canon 5D MkIII, EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro @ f/5.6, 1/400 sec, ISO 400

Out in our “Back 40” we have several bunches of bright yellow daffodils.  Ah ha … great background opportunity.  Now I just needed to find something to put in front.  A few emerging Japanese Maple leaf buds caught my eye.  So I put them together.  The challenge was to get an interesting composition while the branch was moving in the wind.  A relative open f-stop and a moderate shutter speed gave me the best balance.

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Soft Pink

150415_Star Magnolia Macro Soft by Karl G. Graf. Canon 7D MkII, EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro @ 100mm, f/8, 1/250 sec, ISO 200

These subtle pink petals of our Star Magnolia caught my eye this afternoon.  The tree is in full bloom.  The blossoms are in a fresh crisp state which typically does not last very long.  Wind and wet weather usually turn the petal edges brown within a day or two after the bloom.  I caught it in the perfect state this year.

I softened the image slightly to give it a soft look.  It adds to the feeling that I had when I was shooting the image.

 

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Purple Crocus

150410_PurpleCrocus_ME by Karl Graf. Canon 5D MkIII, EF 180mm Macro 3.5L – Multiple Exposure

These purple crocuses came out two days after the white ones.  They do so every year.  The white crocuses come out with a few blooms first, followed by the rest a couple days later.  The purple crocuses seem to come out all at once.  I was lucky with a couple of nice warm days when the blooms emerged.  The last couple of days have been cold and rainy.  The crispness of the flowers are now gone.

For Lexie:  The way this image was achieved is different from the white crocus image in my post a few days ago.  Large telephoto lenses have a narrow depth of field.  My target here was to get enough depth of field to capture detail in the nearest petal, the center, and the farthest petal of the nearest bloom.  It took an aperture setting of f/16 to achieve this.  However, using this aperture also pulled in detail from the background flowers.  I then took an image with the widest aperture (f/3.5) of my lens which only captured the center of the nearest flower in focus.  The edges of the bloom and all the background blooms were not in focus.  To make sure the images would line up when I processed them, I used a tripod.

Back on my computer, I combined the f/3.5 and f/16 images into a multiple exposure using Photoshop’s layers.  The background layer was the sharp f/16 image.  The second layer was the f/3.5 image.  I added a layer mask to the second layer and “painted” through the nearest bloom of the f/16 flower.  I then lightened the sharp bloom and darkened the edges to get the final image.

The following is the f/16 SOC image as reference:

150410_PurpleCrocus_SOC by Karl Graf.

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