experiments in flora

I am playing around with a new lens for my camera (50mm, f/1.8), and have been taking pictures of flowers in my yard.

What can I say?

I love roses...



This picture is straight out of the camera. Nice color, but not as vivid as I would like it to be.



I created an adjustment layer in photoshop and tweaked the hue/saturation and the brightness/contrast of the picture. You will see that the orange in the flower has popped out making the flower seem a bit more dramatic.



Because I love black and white pictures, I changed the mode of the original into grayscale, and adjusted the brightness/contrast a bit to make it pop out from the black background. But still was not satisfied...



I tweaked the picture a bit more, and changed the mode into what is called a 'duotone' with black and a yellow-ish color. The result is much more dramatic than a simple black and white.

Again, these pictures were taken using a f1.8 50mm lens. I cannot wait to get my hands on a 50mm f1.2 lens!

Lease