"Pay attention to the world." -- Susan Sontag
 

Orchids Collection (Set 3 of 4)

The gallery below contains the third set of orchid photos I’ve completed for my Flickr Reboot project  — using Lightroom and the Nik Collection by DxO to develop and enhance originals taken at the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

I’ve been documenting the project and my workflow using this category: Flickr Reboot.

The first set of orchid photos for this project is here: Orchids Collection (Set 1 of 4). The second set is here: Orchids Collection (Set 2 of 4).

Many of the photos in this set (and the fourth and final set I’ll post tomorrow) were taken in lower lighting than those in the previous two sets. I was able to compensate for the darker conditions (and additional grain in the photos) by softening and darkening the background with contrast filters in the Nik Collection Color Efex Pro tool, then increasing center brightness to emphasize the flowers as focal points. As a last step, I used Sharpener Pro — selecting specific sections of each flower using control points available in all the Nik tools — to accentuate detail.

Select the first image to begin a slideshow …. thanks!

Orchids Collection (Set 2 of 4)

The gallery below contains the second set of orchid photos I’ve completed for my Flickr Reboot project  — using Lightroom and the Nik Collection by DxO to develop and enhance originals taken at the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

I’ve been documenting the project and my workflow using this category: Flickr Reboot.

The previous set of orchid photos for this project is here: Orchids Collection (Set 1 of 4).

Select the first image to begin a slideshow …. thanks!

Orchids Collection (Set 1 of 4)

Hello! Below is a gallery containing the first set of orchid photos I’ve completed for my Flickr Reboot project  — using Lightroom and the Nik Collection by DxO to develop and enhance originals taken at the Atlanta Botanical Garden over several years. I’m holding off on making a decision about reloading the photos to Flickr or hosting them somewhere else until I’ve finished several sets of different subjects, so I thought I would post what I’ve done so far here: the first 20 — of 80 — today and the rest throughout the week in three more blog posts.

The workflow to get through the all 80 images remained similar to what I described in this post: Before and After: Flickr Reboot โ€“ Orchids, using mostly the same filters from the Nik Collection, though varying settings on individual filters depending on the color and focus characteristics of the original images. There are certainly some cases where I’m “pushing the pixels” quite a bit, especially since the original photos were taken as jpeg images rather than RAW, and sometimes in low light conditions. Still … I’m pretty satisfied with the results, and I hope you enjoy looking at them as much as I enjoyed jazzing them up.

I’ve added a Flickr Reboot category to this site, updated past posts about the project with this category, and will use it as I continue to work through the 1200 images. Progress is being made!

Select the first image to begin a slideshow …. thanks!

Keeping Cool in the Summer Shade

After a dark and stormy night, it’s been a hot and humid morning … so I put together a small gallery of ferns, berries, flowers, vines, and ‘shrooms beating the heat in the summer shade.

Click the first image to begin the slideshow and enjoy the shade; stay cool!