Lighting Is Everything

Posted on Nov 5th, 2009 | 4 comments

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It’s difficult to get a flower shot that is noteworthy. Flowers are pretty. If you can take a shot that’s in focus and if you have even the most rudimentary sense of design and composition, it’s fairly easy to take a photo that can at least to some degree, reproduce the beautiful thing you saw. Problem is, there are trillions of photos that look just like it in trillions of collections of every moderately talented digital photographer everywhere. I confess, most of my own flower shots fall into this category. But this one, I thought, was unique and dramatic, and oddly, quite accidental.

Late one afternoon following a summer rain, my grandson and I went for a walk in our neighborhood and took some wildflower shots. Around here, yellow daylilies grow wild just about everywhere. Most of my shots were pretty, but from a creative standpoint, just mundane and common ‘pretty flower shots.’ This shot, however, caught my eye as being unique, thanks to the backlighting that I captured quite by accident. Darkening the background added even more drama to the overall lighting effect. Then, duplicating that layer and applying the Overlay Blending option bumped up the contrast and saturation and really made the bloom pop. That was really an accident too.

Well, God bless the accidental accidents. Sometimes they’re just downright GOOD.

(Click on the preview above to pull up a full view of the picture.)

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