Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Flaming Tree!

Still heaps to do at work, and I'm still finding it hard to get my act together to take a reasonable shot.  I'm fascinated by how quickly my familiarity with the camera's controls is lost after only a few weeks lack of use.  At work today I noticed a flame tree near the office and thought I'd take a few shots on my way home.  When I noticed the tree earlier there was a lovely contrast between the rich blue of the sky and the vibrant red of the flowers.

When I left for home the sky was cloudy and the wind was picking up making the flowers wander about.  The image I'd "seen" before just wasn't there.
A friend had been asking about HDR and with Trey Radcliff coming out to NZ later this week I couldn't resist doing a bit of work on the images I'd taken.  Hopeless!  My efforts were not good at at; so bad in fact that I saved nothing.  This was becoming quite depressing really.

The colours just weren't working, yet, whilst in NX2, using the colour picker and showing the selection the monochrome image looked rather good.  Much better in fact than my colour image.  If only I could save this monochrome image I'd have something reasonable!  (If you know how to do this please let me know).  The first image in this post is a desaturated version of the original with a bit of blue and green added to the white clouds.  I can't say this looks anything like the gloriously vibrant tree I saw, but the image does intrigue me.  Not perfect, but at least I'm trying to get back into the groove again.

The original image?  That's the second image in the post.  Not as sharp as I'd have liked; possibly due to the breeze I mentioned earlier.  None of the colour contrasts I'd have liked either.  Perhaps tomorrow, if the sky is blue and there's no rain I'll try again :-)

What do you think?  The first image doesn't present the richness of the red flowers, but I'm not convinced the second image does either!  The first looks quite drab in comparison to the second, but is that because your eye can see the brighter colours of the second?

1 comment:

  1. I think the problem is to do with lack of back lighting to pick out the edges of the flowers that you want to accentuate and a bit too much detail in the background.

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