Flowers Archives - Induced Chaos Photography

Portland Roses – Part 2

This is the rest of the roses from Portland, Oregon that I shot. I wish the weather was better when I was out there visiting but the shots I got were pretty good and I did enjoy visiting the city. Would have loved to see the Japanese Gardens that were next to the Rose Garden but I was out of time and I had a plane to catch to San Diego.

I also want to say that this is the last post for weekends going forward. Taking last weekend off made me realize that I could do better editing when I had time to put cohesive series together and work on images instead of rushing them at the end of the day. Churning out images 7 days a week is a lot of effort. While doing that many edits has really pushed my editing skills it also has made me sloppy by rushing them. So no more. Going forward there will be no more images on Saturday or Sunday. I’ll post a reminder next week but this is it.

Enjoy the final weekend post. I go out with flowers much like it started!

Portland Roses – Part 1

It’s my Mom’s birthday today. She would be the one that comments everyday on every post. She often times mentions that I should have more flowers. I often respond offline that I am not a flower photographer. They were great when I first started in photography but not so much now. I periodically take pictures of them and throw them up on the site to make her happy.

It it with great fanfare that I held these images back from when I was in Portland in May. I had the opportunity to go to the Portland Rose Garden which is free and open to the public. I never knew Portland, Oregon was that into roses but apparently they have a huge festival every year. So before I flew down to San Diego I went with a group and shot a bunch of photos. It seemed a better idea than sitting in a hotel bar or an airport bar.

If you are a lover of roses you are going to like this. Think there are 28 images total and I’ll split them up into 2 parts. I was very basic on the edits simply because there was so many to process. I kept it simple and if there were imperfections on the roses they stayed because to clean up that many images would have been a nightmare. The one good thing I do now versus when I started with flowers is I use gradients and do localized contrast adjustments. This means I don’t get weird background behind the flowers. By using the gradients I can keep the focus on the flower.

Most of these were shot with my Sony A7R and the 24-240mm with a few shot with my Sony RX100M3.

Enjoy.

Secret Garden – Part 2

With a break from flowers with some architectural stuff I feel I can attempt some more flowers! So I return to my secret garden or the US National Botanical Gardens. Considering I was stuck behind a Chinese tour group with photo permits for tripods I guess its not that secret. I have encountered Chinese tour groups before in Thailand and they are serious about their gear. I was genuinely impressed by the tripod permits they had. They are not that easy to get and they take planning.

I’m not sure how I feel about this batch. This is where I started to have some flash issues and I was fighting with the flash and camera to get the look I was going for. One of the problem was the LCD was showing me some funky colors but when I loaded them in Lightroom things looked normal. Even still you can tell I used flash. I am far from a flash guru. I’m not afraid of flash I just don’t use it often enough.

Usual round of editing in Lightroom and Photoshop. I will say that in all my years of shooting flowers this is the best detailed batch I have ever gotten. It has held up to the sharpening color correction well. So there is something to using flash. Maybe one day I’ll get ambition and do focus stacking.

Enjoy.

Wildflowers

You belong among the wildflowers
You belong in a boat out at sea
Sail away, kill off the hours
You belong somewhere you feel free

Run away, find you a lover
Go away somewhere all bright and new
I have seen no other
Who compares with you

You belong among the wildflowers
You belong in a boat out at sea
You belong with your love on your arm
You belong somewhere you feel free

Run away, go find a lover
Run away, let your heart be your guide
You deserve the deepest of cover
You belong in that home by and by

You belong among the wildflowers
You belong somewhere close to me
Far away from your trouble and worry
You belong somewhere you feel free
You belong somewhere you feel free

Tom Petty – Wildflowers

Small. Delicate. Things.

Title explains what I think of all these images. Very pleased so far with how all the images have come out with the Tokina 24-200mm lens. It’s not a macro lens in any sense but it handled the flowers very well. Mix that in with the Sony A7R’s giant 36.4mp sensor I get more tone and depth than I am used to working with.

This is the second batch out of the camera for flowers and I think I have the work flow figured out to the point I like these images better than the first set. Found a camera raw profile that works for flowers and will stick with it since I get much deeper colors natively out of the image.

Enjoy.

Flora Maximus

These are the other flowers that I took when I did the Sunshine of Your Love images. I have no idea what these flowers are called and to be honest doesn’t really matter. They are flowers or weeds or something between them. I’m not a botanist and really don’t pretend to be otherwise.

Like the other set of images I shot these using an Olympus OMD-EM1 and the Olympus 75mm 1.8 (150mm eq). Using tweaked settings and a ISO of 100 the files have remained critically sharp even at 100% which is something I have been struggling with. So very happy how these turned out in regards to image quality.

I think I have managed to get a flower workflow hammered out in Photoshop as well. Little dodging and burning in critical areas to keep the colorful bits the focus of the image.

Enjoy.

Sunshine Of Your Love

As usual; points if you get the reference.

I am fighting of a potentially debilitating attack of man flu also known as a sinus infection because the weather has been a bit weird. Still, I managed to stop and shoot a small plot of flowers I have been driving past daily. Fairly obvious some of the flowers that were there.

I used an Olympus EM1 which I recently changed some settings on to get better detail out of via Robin Wong’s excellent hints on his blog. The lens was my Olympus 75mm 1.8 (150mm eq). I really have stopped using my macro lens just to break myself of the habit of shoving the lens as close as possible to the flower. With a longer focal length I stand back and get more of the flower into the shot which I think provides a more interesting image.

Enjoy!