Today, I decided to go through some old shots from last year. During a walk back in July at Old Uppsala, I made several shots of and a hover fly. I processed and upload one of best the shots quickly but left the others. Today, I convered one of the remaining shots to sepia, more or less by chance. I really liked the outcome, especially the petals and the bokeh. Nothing special with the post processing, some vignetting, used curves to increase the contrast, played a bit with the grayscale mix and I also added some black,fill light and recovery.
This photo is from the Botanical Garden in Uppsala, Sweden. The Botanical Garden was founded over 350 years ago and it’s the oldest one in Sweden. It is situated just west of the Uppsala Castle. In 1787, Uppsala University received the garden as a gift from the King Gustav III. Today, the garden houses about 13000 species.
The flower is from the newer part of garden where flowers and plants from the whole world are show cased. One can spend considerable time in just a small part of the garden since the possibilities for photography are virtually endless. Beside the flowers and the plants, the architecture and the layout of the garden also gives able room for great photography.
For this flower, I wanted to enhance the prominent stamens. The petals were very flat, making the stamens rise above them. I used the Canon 100/2.8 Macro and tilted the camera somewhat to shot the flower from the side. I should probably have used a smaller aperture since the rear of the stamens are somewhat out of focus.
For the post processing, I used a Lightroom preset call RAW_Sepia, available at Inside Lightroom. I increased the clarity a bit and made a small crop and rotation. The preset uses heavy vignetting that in my opinion works well for this shot.
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.
