Here is my photo for January 4th.

The tiny image on the blog does not do it justice. The image on pbase looks far more dramatic so please take a look here //www.pbase.com/bob_n/image/107797825/original

The Setup

- Camera on tripod

- Tethered to the PC via USB cable

- The usual deep red wrinkle free drape

- A remote release

- Single low-tech light source

- 100mm F2.8 Macro lens

Other details

The aperature was set to F20 as I wanted as much of the flower in focus as possible. Typically, if you want your subject to pop then you would isolate it from a scene by opening up the aperature to say F2.8 or lower, but in this case I needed a much greater depth of field and used the dark background to isolate the subject instead. To remove the red tint of the drape I used a mask in photoshop starting with the Select->Colour Range tool and then created a curves adjustment layer and lowered it down until the background became near-black.

When shooting bright colours, especially flowers, I prefer to under-expose the image slightly to avoid blowing out any of the channels and suffering a loss of detail, then I bring them back up again with curves.

Freezing rain today, hence the flowers purchased from the local grocery store.

Bob