Henry Heerschap
May 2023 - Imperial Fritillary
Original
About the Image(s)
April is tulip season in the Pacific Northwest and the Skagit Valley of Washington State is the epicenter for chasers of the colorful flowers.
My wife and I make the pilgrimage every year looking for new and different ways to capture it all. For many years, one of my chief strategies is to bring along my IR camera with an eye toward finding interesting shapes and textures lurking beneath all those distracting hues. This year, my eye was drawn to this Imperial Fritillary which looks as if it has a circle of upside down tulips around the perimeter. I found this one near a rustic fence rail.
I did the black and white conversion in Lightroom Classic using the B&W 03 profile, then did a bit of exposure adjusting and cropping. I took it into Photoshop and removed the upper rail and a few other bits and pieces. I ran it through On1 Effects using Dynamic Contrast (natural preset) and a custom vignette. I finally masked out the background and ran Nik Color Efex Pro Detail Extractor on plants.
Sony A6500, full spectrum conversion with 720nm clip filter, Sony 18-135 lens. ISO 400, 80mm, f/14, 1//125 second. Shot handheld.
14 comments posted
Looks like a location I'd love to visit. Beautiful flower so well captured in infrared. I am still a bit conflicted with the lines in the stone/wood of the background. Can those be brought down somehow? If only...a black cloth drape over the fence in the b/g to yield a bold white on black! Posted: 05/01/2023 09:17:23
I do take your point, however. It wouldn't have been too hard to remove the fence altogether in post and I'll take a look at that. Posted: 05/09/2023 10:10:12
I like the shallow depth-of-field, giving prominence to the flowers. Post processing well handled. That said, I wondered if a low viewpoint would have helped overcome the distracting bits in the background. Just a humble opinion! Posted: 05/05/2023 05:44:29
Being an old guy, I'm finding getting low to be harder each time I do stuff like this but your point is well taken. Posted: 05/09/2023 10:12:19
IR and flowers are hard and you have done really well with your capture. Because I am such a fan of flower photography, I feel that there is so much that you could do to make this perfect. I realize that you want to show off the tulips as well as the main bloom (I may have cropped them out). I would use camera raw to blur the background to make those lovely flowers pop. Posted: 05/07/2023 12:04:58
This is an interesting flower overlay. The Fritillary has photobombed the traditional almost staid tulips and by that I mean its flowers are facing down and its leaves are a hairdo out of control. This shot would not work without it in my view.
Rather than removing the background entirely, darken it and reduce its sharpness so it fades away gracefully
Regards
Emil Posted: 05/12/2023 12:31:42