Seed 'ed

Another image from the spring garden, although this one is of a head that's already shed its seeds. I wish I could tell you what sort of plant this is, but I don't know its name. Its a low bush with long stems and large, fury green flowers. 

No, me neither.

Tulip Three

Another image from the tulip session as promised in my previous post. Not as symmetrical as the previous image, not as pleasing in its formality, but I like the detailing on the petals. And the shape does lend itself to the square format, and the square format lends itself to images of flowers.

Et Tu Lip, Two

This is more like it. I spent so much time mucking about with the previous image that the tulips had actually bloomed by the time that I posted it. And so here is the actual flower.

This works as a monochrome image, I think, unlike the previous one and for reasons that I don't quite understand. I did make a right pils of the white balance when capturing this image - thank God for UFRaw. Despite all the opprobrium that I've heaped on the heads of the developers, I'd have been stuck without it on this occasion.

Anyway, when you're on a roll and all that - I have at least one more decent image for this session, which I'll post soon.

Et Tu, Lip

I generally don't spend that much time working on the images that I post - you may, or may not find that surprising. However, I spent what seems like endless amounts of time over several evenings mucking about with this one.

This is probably because the initial idea that I had for this image didn't work, for reasons that I'm not entirely clear on. The intention was that it would be a monochrome image set against a dark background, a la Edward Weston. 

Anyway, I created the layer mask - which took an age and I ended up painting the thing, which I try to avoid - did the conversion and fiddled with Curves, but I just couldn't make it work. So, I sampled the image to produce the background colour, pushed the saturation a bit, here we are.

I should say that the photograph was taken mid afternoon in our garden against a white background. I suspect that this is the problem - what the image really needs is raking light to boost the contrast and define the texture of the flower better. Still, we live and learn, I suppose.