Quote:
Originally Posted by Wathepleela
...a series of pics from one (young) lady of her orchids.... She puts them against the wall by the side of her house, among an haphazard scattering (of props) of watering cans and empty pots, then snaps away. Simple as those shots were (taken with her point and shoot), they stopped me in my track, again we're talking about the interplay of light, colors and space, plus in this case, composition:
Her signature was unmistakable and I wonder if she was even aware of it. I don't think she bothered with post-processing, or even knew about it, stuff weren't "cleaned" up as they were "supposed" to.
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Another thing not mentioned before is that film and digital devices don't capture color the way the human eye/brain does. Cheap digital phone cameras have trouble capturing blue shades correctly. If you want examples, look at the photos I've posted here. Different digital camera settings alter the way the camera captures colors. Settings for faces enhance red shades. Almost all digital images of flowers with substantial blue shades will require digital processing to make them look like something the eye/brain would see/create.
You can make photos as does the lady in the video if you shoot from some distance. Beyond a certain distance from the subject, which distance varies with the lens, the camera can be set to focus on infinity, and everything past that certain distance will be in focus. With this kind of photo, most of the artistic work will be done by creating the arrangement. Most people further process these images with careful cropping and color balance on the computer. But it only works for shots from some distance.
The reason is that, with lenses in general, the closer the film or charge capture device is to the subject, the narrower is the volume of space in front of the camera that is in focus.
This volume of space is called the focal plane. It's not really a plane; it's a volume that is narrow front to back (in spatial relation to the camera) but extends up and sideways. Think of it as an invisible, flat piece of glass perpendicular to the lens axis. Anything contained inside the boundaries of that piece of glass will be in focus. Anything outside will be fuzzy. The closer the camera approaches the subject, the thinner will be the "glass." For distance shots, everything is in focus.
Very close focus lenses ("macro") have a very narrow depth of field. When photographing a tiny flower, it is common that not even the entire flower will be in focus. Imagine only part of the flower inside the thin focal volume. The parts sticking out in front and in back of the focal volume will be blurry, and the blurriness will increase as the distance to the flower part increases, in front and in back. The part of the flower in focus will appear to be contained in a ring centered where the camera is pointed. The more of the flower in the focal volume and thus in focus, the wider this ring will be. At the extreme front of the flower the ring of focus will be a small circle of focus. (It would be so at the back of the flower, as well, if we could see the back - but the flower prevents this.) More on this ring later.
The only way to increase the depth of field when photographing a small object is to increase the distance to the camera. This often necessitates using a different lens. A high-magnification macro lens can only be used very closely to the subject. Increasing the distance to the subject necessitates increasing the lighting or increasing the opening of the lens (aperture.) Increasing the aperture causes the depth of field to narrow, which is what we were trying to avoid. This is why most macro photography involves extra light; either electric, or solar reflectors - we want to use the narrowest aperture we can to increase the depth of field.
The subject in such a photo taken at a somewhat increased distance will occupy a smaller area of the photograph than it would with a close macro lens. Cropping and magnifying will be necessary for an image filling the photograph. The image becomes slightly more blurry when enlarged.
To get around this when photographing small objects, a digital technique called "stacking" has been developed. People make a series of macro photos focusing on the subject from front to back (or back to front.) Then they use software to select out the in-focus rings from each photo, and assemble these rings into one image. What results is a macro image in which the entire subject is in focus. The more images with slightly differing focus used, the sharper the resulting image appears.
There are a number of threads here on Orchid Board in which members discuss their use of this technique. If you search on "stacking" you will find them.
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