Good Morning Sunshine

Back in June, my husband decided to plant some sunflowers in pots. I was skeptical that they would have time to grow, mature, and bloom, but they were a short variety and started blooming a a couple of weeks ago. The flowers are an unusual pale yellow.

I tried a few different shots but wasn’t excited. I really liked the pattern and detail of the center disk of one of them but wasn't sure how to show that off in an interesting way. This version is slightly cropped and lightly adjusted.

Anne Houde, September 2019

I had an idea of having the flower in the role of rising sun, so I tried some different crops and played around until I got an abstract background in colors that made me happy.  It is a severe crop, though, so maybe I want to go out and try some more close up shots.

Anne Houde, September 2019

From a technical point of view, the yellow color of the flower was giving me trouble. It had a tendency to look blown out, too bright and the pale yellow that I saw with my eyes was tricky to reproduce without creating a muddy greenish gray. In the end, I pushed the petals into a more traditional golden yellow shade using a combination of the HSL sliders in Lightroom and using the brush with Auto Mask to work on just the petals. 

Try this: find a flower that appeals to you and try to figure out how to make an image that brings out its essence as you perceive it. How close or far from reality will your image end up? Were you happy with your first images right out of camera? Did you have to try again? How can you transform your images in post-processing?