This is one of those pictures that seems kind of simple at first glance, but was actually a lot more difficult to create than it might appear. Well, perhaps difficult isn’t really the right term…maybe thoughtful? In-depth? I guess what I’m trying to say is, there’s more to this than meets the eye. I took it on a rainy day at the botanic gardens here in town, and made several creative choices that ultimately ended up with the specific shot you see. Nothing here is an accident, and while I didn’t spend a great deal of time on this, I couldn’t have taken this picture without years of practice, patience, and self-reflection, and I am very happy with how it turned out.
First, the flower itself. There were several in the small patch of…tulips?…that were in various state of unfurling; this one, still wrapped upon itself, presented the best opportunity from a photographic point of view. I fully recognize and acknowledge that my compositions are usually not complicated: one single easily-identifiable subject against a blurry background. It’s not groundbreaking, but it usually gets pretty good results, and those kinds of photos are, in my opinion, a lot of fun to take. That was the case here, and the reason I selected this specific flower among all the available options. I then positioned myself such that it would be isolated from any other flowers around it–notice how the subject is neatly contained between the two other flowers just to the right and to the left, in front of a relatively dark background that makes it easy to see. Had I moved myself an inch to either side, the picture would be completely different and probably not in a good way.
There’s other compositional elements at work here that help create the specific scene I wanted: the green blade extending through the frame alongside the flower, the out-of-focus leaves on the right, the glistening texture of the flower thanks to an f/8 aperture (in other words, depth of field was kept under control), and the direction of light to top it all off. I shot this with the sun above and in front of me, instead of behind me, which meant that the scene was backlit and, as a result, making the flower sparkle and shine while also giving a bit of a glowing effect to some of the dark areas on the top right.
I also used a tool in Lightroom that Adobe released about a year ago: AI-Powered Denoise. Normally I’m quite skeptical of most things AI-related, but this one serves a singular purpose and the results are pretty great. Instead of applying a blanket denoise algorithm to the entire photo, the software does some kind of behind-the-scenes analysis to figure out what parts of the image should be processed to remove noise and grain, what shouldn’t and how much to apply the denoise as well. I used it in this image to clean up the noise behind the flower and it turned out great. I’ve used this tool off and on since it became available, and it’s probably the kind of thing that I will continue to use and experiment with over time.
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