Photo Story: Purple Flower in the Fog

This purple flower was photographed at the edge of a pond. The mist rising off of the pond in the background gives a foggy look to the photo. This wildflower is called a Pickerel Rush, also called a Pickerel Weed.

Purple Flower in the Fog

When going on a photo hike in the early morning, look for flowers at the edge of ponds, lakes, and rivers to photograph. The water or mist rising off the water can provide a clean background for your photographs.

I left some of the reeds in the background to add interest to the photo. I also cropped the photo from the left to balance the flower and the reeds in the photograph.

Since I had the foggy background for the flower, I wanted create an ethereal like look to the photograph. I spent quite a bit of time looking through filters and presets before deciding on a direction to process the image. I ended up spending quite a bit of time post processing this image. See the processing steps below to see how I finally decided to process the image.

Pickerel Rush Photo Details

Camera: Olympus OM-D E-M1
Lens: Olympus 60mm f/2.8 Macro Lens
Focal Length: 60mm
ISO: 250
Aperture: f/9.0
Shutter Speed: 1/80 of a second
Exposure Compensation: +1
Lighting: Sunny Morning with mist rising off a Pond

Wildflower Photo Processing

Cloned out some background distractions using the Clone Stamp Tool in Photoshop CC 2014.
Selectively lightened and darkened parts of the image using Viveza from the Nik Collection.
Used the 70’s Chrome Little recipe in Color Efex Pro 4 as a starting point for my processing. I removed the border from the filter. The 70’s Chrome Little recipe uses the Film Efex Vintage, Vignette Lens, and Image Borders filters.
Used the Hunter Green Colored filter in Topaz Adjust to add a slightly green tone to the Background. Used a layer mask in Photoshop CC 2014 to only apply the filter to the background of the photo.

Selectively sharpened the image using the Unsharp filter and a layer mask in Photoshop CC 2014. Copied the layer mask from the prior step.
Cropped the photo in Lightroom 5 and increased the saturation and luminance of the purples and magenta colors in the photo using the color sliders.

Written by Martin Belan

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