Photo Story: A Pair of Dames Rocket Wildflower Blooms

This pair of Dames Rocket wildflowers is a good example of using balance in your flower photography.

A Pair of Dames Rocket Wildflower Blooms

These blooms almost look like they are a mirror effect of a single flower that was created in post processing. But they are not. This is the actual composition of these flowers. The way these flowers are composed gives a balanced feel to the photograph.

I also processed the flowers with a painted effect (below). I used the Watercolor III filter in Topaz Impression and the Black Rose preset in Topaz Adjust to create an artistic look in photograph shown below.

Painted Dames Rocket Blooms

I find that it’s always a good idea to apply presets from Topaz Impression or another painting plugin to your flower photographs. You never know what kind of art you may get.

Dames Rocket Wildflower Photo Details

Camera: Olympus OM-D E-M1
Lens: Olympus 60mm f/2.8 Macro Lens
Focal Length: 60mm
ISO: 500
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/25 of a second
Exposure Compensation: -3/10
Lighting: Shady, Wooded Area

Wildflower Photo Processing

Cropped the photo in Lightroom 5.
Applied the Detail Extractor Filter in Color Efex Pro 4.
Used the Flowers II filter in Topaz Clarity.

Applied the Lighten / Darken Center Filter twice in Color Efex Pro 4. I did this to darken the background and brighten the 2 flowers. I stacked two copies of the filter. In the first filter, I centered the effect on the left flower while putting a negative control point over the right flower. I reversed this in the second filter.
Used Viveza 2 to selectively lighten and darken areas of the photo.
Selectively removed noise from the photo using Topaz DeNoise.
Selectively sharpened the photo using the Unsharp Mask Filter in Photoshop CC 2014. The layer mask was copied and modified from the last processing step.

Written by Martin Belan

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