Tulips

Spring is such a wonderful time to play with colour.  I saw these tulips in someone else’s garden in Nanaimo and as I got a little closer I noticed the beautiful, striking, red fringe on the edge of the petal.  As I stood there the background was the light purple flowers that you see at the bottom of the frame.  I didn’t like this as much so I got down low and background became dark green foliage that I threw out of focus with a 3.5 aperture.  There was a very distracting light coloured branch above the flower on the far right and I cloned it out but I am still not very good with the clone brush and I feel like you can tell I was messing with it.  I wanted a gradation of tone in the background so I took the image into Viveza and darkened the portion of the background that was above the flowers.  This way the out of focus purple flowers, instead of being a distraction are a part of the background tone transition from light at the bottom to darker at the top with the tulips taking up a very striking intermediary space.

I have another treatment of tulips here and some other flowers here and here.​

www.seeingberg.com

A Painter's Accident

My brother-in-law has an amazing garden where he grows some really wonderful flowers. EOS Rebel XSi, EFS 50mm 1.4, at f/2, 1/350, ISO 200

A walk through my brother-in-law’s garden is a riot of colour and texture, there are row on row of lilies.  Variety after variety in a painter’s accident, a splash and spill of colour all over a prairie backyard.  I took photo after photo but then I came across this very interesting sunflower.  I loved the colours and the contrast with the muted colours and shapes of the buds that where yet to bloom.  The smaller size as they fade into the background of the picture draws your eye in.  I love my 50mm 1.4, it produces such amazing results and the ability to isolate the subject of a photo against a busy background with shallow depth of field produces a result that just cannot be replicated with a point and shoot.  I also really like the way that it forces you to move around to compose your shot.  Zoom lenses are great but they make make me lazy and you see different things when are forced to move around to get an interesting shot.

-Russell Berg