Portrait of a Tulip

Be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence.
-Minor White

I tend to avoid taking pictures when the sun is high in the sky, but yesterday when I went out in the yard around 1, there was some good light hitting the tulips. I took quite a few pictures before I really became present and observed what was going on. The tulips were dancing in the breeze and basking in the warm sun. After I became aware of what was going on I changed my approach and got some amazing images with my Nikon (see one below.)

I was using camera+ and the white balance was totally thrown off on all but one image because of the intense color. I’m surprised by how much detail there is in this one. All I did was add a little ambiance, a tiny amount of drama, and a little structure in Snapseed.

Here is the winning shot of the day from my Nikon.

Symmetrical Flower

Yesterday I bought an app that was on sale and had a lot of good reviews called FX Photo Studio. After a few minutes exploring it, I felt like a sucker because its filled with 20MB of fluff. There are a lot of filters, but I found like 7 that I might actually use. There are hardly any adjustment sliders to edit your photos, so I wouldn’t call this an editor. I’m not impressed at all to be honest and I’d save your dollar if its still on sale for that price. If, however, you are a teenage girl, you might like this app because of all the cheesy butterfly or flower frames.

This image was created with the Symmetry Vertical filter. It basically copies the left half of the image and flips it to make a symmetrical image. There are 3 symmetry filters that might make for some interesting creations, but I don’t know if I’m going to keep this 20MB app on my phone just in case I want to use one of them once a month.

More Macro!

I gotta say I love exploring the world of macro. I was going to save this for tomorrow morning, but I really like this one, so I’ll share now. To provide a sense of scale, thats a water drop on the left side of the image. I got too close at first and the water on my lens rubbed off onto the flower…oops.

Its been windy lately and some of the anemone’s got blown over. Instead of trying to do macro work out in the wind, I snapped off one of the anemone’s that was laying on the ground, but still in good shape. I brought it into my bathroom, put the flower on the counter, and set my iPhone on a container of hair gel that was just at the right height to focus on the stamen. Then I took about 30 pictures with camera+.

Just a quick edit in Snapseed to crop, add a little drama and structure, and I was done. Their structure tool is pretty awesome in their photoshop plugins when it comes to pulling out detail in an image. I seldom use it in Snapseed with my iPhoneography because it also adds noise (grain) to the image. So, if you do use it, be careful not to overdo it.