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.
