Please post no more than five images a day and respond to as many images as you post. Critics, please be constructive, specific, and nice! Moderated by gahspidy and mtbbrian.
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I like the depth,perspective, colors, lighting and overall content. Every time I look at it I find something else. To me it is appears three dimensional. Reminds me of how the scenes used to look in the old GAF viewmaster.
"You have noticed that truth comes into this world with two faces. One is sad with suffering and the other laughs; but it is the same face, laughing and weeping." ~ Black Elk
I would be happy to explain both the how and the why.
I like tone mapping. I have always like the extreme lighting and texture you can get with software like photomatix. But I have grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of control given by photomatix. Don't get me wrong, it gives you lots of control, but if you try to go for extreme effects, you end up getting results that were starting to make my unsatisfied.
So most of my photos posted here use the same work flow. I take one camera raw shot. I load it into photoshop and save 2-5 exposures one to two stops apart. I then load these in photomatix and tone map them, typically with a fairly extreme setting mostly to get local texture enhancement. One thing about photomatix though is that if you take all of your exposures from basically one raw exposure, you are going to massively amplify the noise, because photomatix sees it as local contrast. This is why multiple raw exposures from the camera are usually needed for HDR stuff, so that the noise averages out better.
So with this technique, large areas in the tone mapped file will not be usable because of noise. But I never use the full tone map anymore anyway. What I do is just load the original exposures into photoshop and load the tone mapped image as well. I make them all layers in one doucment, mask them all out and then manually paint the masks to expose the pieces of the exposure layers that I want to. When you have a lot of layers with minor exposure changes, you can get some nice effects.
Incidentally, I think this is why I get so much redness in some of my self portraits. Colors always saturate more at lower exposure levels, so when I paint in darkness, or even worse, tone maps, I tend to get more red. I do listen to the criticisms and I agree with them, so maybe I should de-saturate the darker exposures before blending.
This shot was taken with the sunset to the left of the flowers and a single off- camera flash to the right. It was actually pretty bright outside, but the flash gave me pretty even exposure on both sides of the flowers. I darkened out the background a lot, because it was ugly dead grass, and patio and house stuff that did not contribute to the picture.
Anyway, thanks for the comments guys. I cannot wait for summer. I am going to be using variations of this technique on all sorts of flowers. The one thing I don't like about this method is that it is leading me to always be producing sinister low-key works. I want to get more high key stuff. In most of these works, I make the darkest layer the base layer and work toward bright. I think the key will end up higher if I start with the brightest layer as the base and paint in the darks. Also, getting backgrounds that I think are worth preserving would help. In lots of these I black out the background just because it is distracting, and I get a lot of negative feedback about that when I leave them in. Blending in dark exposures is kind of a cheap, but labor intensive way of shooting against a dark background.
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