Shutter-life|Adaptive photography and more, by Henrik Johansson

This photo is also from Morgan Territory Regional Preserve, a bit north of Livermore, California. As usual for my Livermore shots, I was out on a bike ride. This time I’d decided to try out the trails that traverses Morgan Territory. I knew of the hilly nature of the area, but I could never believe that the trails actually went from one hill top to the other. And they always went the shortest way. Often the trail was way too step for biking, I even had a hard time of pushing my bike upwards. In a mile, the trail could gain or loose several hundred yards of altitude.

I stopped for a break on the top of the highest hill. As I sat down and admired the views, I noticed some small purple flowers in the grass. For a different persective, I put the camera on the ground and aimed it slightly upwards to capture one of the flowers from below.  It’s quite hard to get a nice composition since you can’t look through the view finder. In some situation, you could benefit from live view, but in this case the display was angled down, towards the ground.

The photo turned out nicely, but I wanted to do something to enhance the small flower and it’s color. I removed all colors except for the purple and magenta. After desaturating the colors, I had to use the dust tool to remove some small spots with residue color since I wanted the flower to be the only object with color. Finally, I used split toning to add a slight tone of red/yellow to the shadows.