Category: photography
Late Summer Color: Mary Ann Lantana (Gallery 1 of 3)
It seems hard to believe, but here in the U.S. southeast the days are already shortening, as we move from summer toward a fall that’s not too far away. Of the four varieties of lantana on my property, Mary Ann Lantana is the most prolific bloomer; it continues to add new flowers through late August and well into September (sometimes even October!). After that, I cut it back — almost to the ground — to get it ready for cooler weather so it can rest over the winter.
For these photos, I used the same post-processing approach that I described for images of my Landmark Citrus Lantana (see Making Pictures: Landmark Citrus Lantana (Gallery 1 of 3), relying heavily on Lightroom’s radial filters and adjustment brushes to emphasize the blooms and, in some cases, darken or eliminate backgrounds. Here are before-and-after versions of four of the eleven photos, those that I transformed the most. The last one’s my favorite!
Funny thing happened as I was assembling this blog post: I realized that I had written several times about my “Miss Huff” Lantana — but as it turns out, I don’t have Miss Huff, I’ve got Mary Ann. They’re very different; see here versus here. Several blog posts, tags, and brain cells have been corrected…. 🙂
Below is the first set of Mary Ann Lantana images. Thanks for taking a look!
Making Pictures: Landmark Citrus Lantana (Gallery 3 of 3)
From my third gallery of Landmark Citrus Lantana, here are the before-and after-images of four of the most transformed photos. Page down for the full gallery of seventeen images.
Here are my final Landmark Citrus Lantana images. The previous galleries are: Making Pictures: Landmark Citrus Lantana (Gallery 1 of 3), where I describe how I processed the photos; and Making Pictures: Landmark Citrus Lantana (Gallery 2 of 3).
Thanks for taking a look!
Making Pictures: Landmark Citrus Lantana (Gallery 2 of 3)
From my second gallery of Landmark Citrus Lantana, here are the before-and after-images of four photos that I transformed using the same electronic sorcery I described in the previous post, Making Pictures: Landmark Citrus Lantana (Gallery 1 of 3):
It’s been a few weeks since I took the photos and completed the first round of adjustments … so I didn’t realized how much I’d altered them until I reset all the changes made to the originals. The last of these four pairs above, especially, show a photo that once upon a time I would have considered unusable, since it was so over-exposed. Yet with some highlight, texture, contrast, and color adjustments — along with using radial filters to remove the background — I ended out with a pretty decent close-up image of that brightly colored bloom. If you would like to see the four before-and-after versions in larger sizes, select the first image above to begin a slideshow.
Here are the second fifteen Landmark Citrus Lantana images, showing the flower buds a few days after they first appeared. With these images, it’s easy to see how the plant earned its “citrus” name: the larger flowers show how magenta, purple, red, yellow, and orange transition to lemon-yellow and orange-orange as they grow up.
Thanks for taking a look!
