About the Image(s)

This was taken at the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show. I was intrigued with the scene because I could see the back of the head of the plant seller and the faces of some of the people interested in the plants. I took several shots and preferred this one as the prospective buyer’s face wasn’t obscured too much by the plants. I also thought that the man walking out of the scene in the background made a good overall composition.

Post-capture manipulation consisted first of cropping the image to a square formant. The Nik Glamour Glow filter was used to give a slightly dreamy feel and the image was blurred, with the effects being removed from the three people using a layer mask. Following Levels and Curves and a Hue / Saturation adjustment, the image was converted to monochrome using the Nik Paper Toner filter. Some of the colour was brought back on the people, again using a layer mask. Then, several clone layers were used to remove the plants hiding part of the faces of the people and Viveza was used to adjust the lighting. A texture layer of some grasses I had taken was added with the opacity reduced so the effect didn’t dominate the image. A series of Viveza, Clone, Levels, Hue / Saturation and Brightness / Contrast layers we used until the image looked the way I wanted it to. Finally, the plant seller was sharpened using the High Pass Filter.

This image took a lot more work than normal and the final image has 54 layers. This was down to the struggle I had to achieve the effect I wanted and, if I did it again, I’m sure I could reduce the number of lavers significantly.

Nikon D800, 50mm Nikkor Prime lens, ISO 1100, f/8, 1/200 sec