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Botanical Garden pics!

mkrishnan

mkrishnan

Moderator emeritus
Original poster
Jan 9, 2004
29,776
15
Grand Rapids, MI, USA
I spent part of the afternoon at the Kanapaha Botanical Gardens, which are here in Gainesville. I think I'll find a lot of good subjects there! :)

Since we still seem to be showing the love for DSLR here on MR ;) I wanted to share.

Lemme know what you think! :) Links to larger versions on PBase.









Oh, btw, after being a photo-attention-whore since I got my Rebel, my Photobucket bandwidth got exceeded in the first 10 days of the month!!! :eek: So, since I knew I'd be needing it soon anyway, I ended up purchasing a PBase subscription. Anyone else use it? It seems to have some nice photographer-friendly features, like providing EXIF data, and it's similar in price to everything else, although it doesn't seem so well suited to acting as a webcache. I think I'll keep using Photobucket or Flickr for that.
 
Two more...I like this style of flower photography (darkened out backgrounds), but I am still very slowly learning how to execute it effectively. :(





BTW, is there any easy way in vBulletin to create a border around an image? the IMG tag does not seem to respect border=xxx. :( The white mattes on these work well on FM, but here they wash into the background of the post....
 
Very nice. The last picture of the first post; the yellow flower, i think could be brightened up a little bit....But thats me... take my criticism with a grain a salt. ;)
 
Thanks, JDar, Puckhead! :) I think you're right about the yellow flower being too dark... the yellow was a little too washed out originally, and I tried to bring it back a little, but I think I darkened it out in the process.... But every day is a post-processing learning experience as well as one behind the lens! :)
 
those pics are amazing! even better than teh ones you posted a couple weeks ago! love the one with the drooping red flowers!
 
homerjward said:
those pics are amazing! even better than teh ones you posted a couple weeks ago! love the one with the drooping red flowers!
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Thank you so much! :) I think I might spend some more time there this afternoon, although I don't want to run through the things that are there too quickly! :) And, erm, I should be working on a journal article we should have submitted a long, long time ago. :(

Here are the last two from yesterday...for the very last one with the blue bell and the yellow interior, I am struggling with a way to make a flower like this jump out. There's something about the skin of the petals that always makes my photos of them seem lifeless. :(



 
mkrishnan said:
Oh, btw, after being a photo-attention-whore since I got my Rebel, my Photobucket bandwidth got exceeded in the first 10 days of the month!!! :eek: So, since I knew I'd be needing it soon anyway, I ended up purchasing a PBase subscription. Anyone else use it? It seems to have some nice photographer-friendly features, like providing EXIF data, and it's similar in price to everything else, although it doesn't seem so well suited to acting as a webcache. I think I'll keep using Photobucket or Flickr for that.
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Hey, just wanted to let you know that Imageshack is another free image hosting service where you don't run out of bandwidth. The only downside for me is that you have to upload your images one by one (and that the pages are litterally covered in Google ads). You don't have to sign up, but if you do you can keep track of all the images you uploaded and their addresses.

And I really like your pics, I'll be looking out for the next ones!
 
Leeloo the 5th said:
And I really like your pics, I'll be looking out for the next ones!
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Thanks! :) And thanks for the imageshack advice. I think PBase will work out slightly better for me, and hopefully the resulting drop in my bandwidth usage at PhotoBucket will let me keep using it for the normal stuff. Flickr seemed like a neat idea, but I find their interface cumbersome, and the iPhoto plugin was very unstable for me, for some reason.

Here are a few more in this series, from today (bigger versions, as always, at PBase) :

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Nice -- a few of them seem underexposed though - maybe it's my monitor. How are you doing the darkened background - while shooting or in Photoshop?

I've done a bit myself -
www.everyrose.com
www.nurserysite.com/clubs/peninsular/

I sometimes have to work with marginal pictures, I use the magic wand to help get a selection of the bloom, and then use that selection alternatly with Select Inverse to sharpen the bloom and blur or desaturate the background to make the flower "pop" to the foreground. A touch of Feathering helps.
 
CanadaRAM said:
Nice -- a few of them seem underexposed though - maybe it's my monitor. How are you doing the darkened background - while shooting or in Photoshop?
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Thank you! They might be a little on the dark side from post'ing -- partially intentionally, and partially because I might have the gamma set a little high on my screen.... :eek: I'm kinda worried about this, actually, since I am starting to think about doing some prints and I need to make sure I know what my colors will look like! :eek:

I am definitely bookmarking your list of rose photos with names from the first site! :D Nice work!

Whenever I try the technique you describe to pop flowers out of a background, I am left with a strong fringe impression at the flower edges, where the transition from the blurred area to the sharpened area is quite obvious, and unnatural.... :( I've tried putting a lesser radial blur on the flower layer, but I've never been happy with it. Is this what feathering is food for addressing?
 
mkrishnan said:
Whenever I try the technique you describe to pop flowers out of a background, I am left with a strong fringe impression at the flower edges, where the transition from the blurred area to the sharpened area is quite obvious, and unnatural.... :( I've tried putting a lesser radial blur on the flower layer, but I've never been happy with it. Is this what feathering is food for addressing?
Click to expand...
Yeah, feathering a selection creates a transition from full effect inside the selection to zero effect outside, over the number of pixels you specify as the amount to feather. That plus choosing not-outrageous values for sharpening and blurring, seems to do the trick.

Should be out shooting roses today, but it's p!$$!#& down rain and I can't be bothered, so here I am posting on MacRumors.

I have a Minolta DiMage 7i 5 Mp -- it has a nice 28mm equiv (most digicams only pull back to 38 mm, some to 35mm) and a 7x zoom. I like zooming on blooms to manipulate the depth of field. Wish it had image stabilization like the new Minoltas do though - I lose a few to hand shake. But I can bang off 150 or so in a 1 hour garden tour, with about 80% keepers. That's really booking it though - hard work. Problems is, once the sun starts to go down...
 
>>>They might be a little on the dark side from post'ing -- partially intentionally, and partially because I might have the gamma set a little high on my screen<<<


They look great on screen--you will almost certainly get different results when printing. I like the dark background and, for lack of a better word, subdued look of the images. These are not cookie cutter flower pictures. I think it's easy to take fairly good flower photos--what a great subject if the wind isn't blowing--but a talent to give them that "different" look.
 
keep the photos coming they are looking great!!
mkrishnan, your using the stock lens right with the rebel? I'm debating between the D 70 and the new rebel or the minolta A200 or A2.
 
puckhead193 said:
keep the photos coming they are looking great!!
mkrishnan, your using the stock lens right with the rebel? I'm debating between the D 70 and the new rebel or the minolta A200 or A2.
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Thanks! And you don't have to ask twice! :p :eek: :D

Actually, all the photos on this page are not with the stock lens. They're with the 50mm f/1.4 Canon prime, which cost me about $280. I used it this weekend more to learn about it and less because it's the ideal lens for this, though. This lens is an amazing value, and it's great for low-light situations, because you can still get by with such a wide aperture. The D70 is hella good, and I think I probably would've gotten one, except budgetwise, the used rebel and this lens were about as much as a D70. :eek:

And JDar -- thanks for the encouragement! I really appreciate it. I don't think I deserve those words yet, but that's what I aspire too -- I think flowers present a great sounding board to speak about your emotions. The picture that seems right is different to every artist, even though the flower has so much beauty in itself. So the charm in a good floral, to me, is not capturing the just the beauty of the flower, but the unique emotions it evokes in you. And for me, there's always some darkness involved! :eek:
 
Amazing Pictures, I love the colors that they show. I have been to our local Botanical Gardens and it is amaing how many quality pictures you could take in such a small couple of greenhouses.
 
Apple said:
Amazing Pictures, I love the colors that they show. I have been to our local Botanical Gardens and it is amaing how many quality pictures you could take in such a small couple of greenhouses.
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Thanks for the comments! Actually, ours is an outdoors garden. Maybe close to 1 mile x 1 mile in size. I think I should volunteer there at some point so I can slowly reduce my ignorance about flowers. :D

Where in NC are you? I was in Raleigh-Durham early last summer and the downtown was beautiful with all of the trees flowering! :)
 
I live in the charlotte area but the botanical garden that I am talking about is the UNCC garden. There are about three greenhouses there and they feature plants from all different climates.
 
Mmmm, greenhouses are very interesting in that way, because you can suddenly see something so different than what grows near you! I'm just enjoying the very different foliage that grows here! :)

Here are a few more stragglers. :) I should really be working on psychology instead of flowers... :rolleyes:

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