About the Image(s)

In this image I am having way too much fun with a Gerber Dasey. I love shooting Gerber Daises as they can be quite colorful, have interesting textures (front and back), are inexpensive, robust (last for several days) and often available in the supermarkets around where I live (in the SF Bay area). This allows me the freedom to try several different approaches to shooting them over several days. I first bought these blooms as a source of the petals / bloom that I used to create last month’s (June 2026) water drop refraction shot.

In this image I was playing with the concept of lighting the flower from the front and taking the image of the back of the bloom. In this case I placed the bloom on a lighted base (designed to light up crystal, small vases and/or figurines) in a darkened room (my bathroom). I could have placed the bloom on top of a low power flashlight as well. See the starting image to get some idea of this set-up.

I captured the initial image as a single shot using my tripod mounted Canon R5MII with a 100 mm f/2.8 macro lens (1.5 sec, f/13, ISO 160). This gave me the petals but left the back overly dark. Since I felt that the back of the bloom was one of the more interesting areas, I made another capture at a longer exposure (2.6 sec) to bring this area out in greater detail. I then combined the two images adding the stem from the second shot to the bloom in the first shot. This manual HDR-like process and all follow-up editing was performed in Photoshop.

I really like the intense dramatic look of this image. Let me know what you all think.