Thursday, July 7, 2011

Flowers: Metaphors for life


There was a time when I thought of flowers, I thought of full blooms. I wanted peak action. No buds and no wilted petals. Just gorgeous flowers in their prime.

And then I experienced Sheila's art. Sheila, at the time, was painting flowers. She didn't narrow her focus to just blooms, the climax of the story. No, she captured the whole tale from bud to bloom to fading away forever.

Now, I see flowers entirely differently.

Today's image was shot with my Canon PowerShot S90 set to automatic. The jpeg was taken into Photoshop CS5 and the endpoints set; I was careful not to blow out the highend values in the yellow petals.

The foliage was already quite dark in the original image but, approaching Photoshop like an electronic darkroom, I burned down the edges even more. I do not use the burn/dodge tool. I selected the area on which I wanted to work, feathered the edge and finally darkened the selection using Curves. I stay away from the burn/dodge tool, although a fellow I worked with at the paper used it all the time.

This image has also not been given a lot of saturation. The jpeg image looked good right from the camera.

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