Chapel Hill Yellow Lantana: Gallery 2 of 4

Here’s the second of four galleries of my Chapel Hill Yellow Lantana. I’ve included some of the larger blooms in this set, where I experimented with getting sufficient focus to show petal detail fully, by using a higher ISO and, in some cases, a bit of extra lighting by attaching an LED lamp to the camera. With the higher ISO and supplemental light, I could use narrower apertures and increase depth of field to capture most of the individual flowers in focus, despite hand-holding the camera nearly on top of the blooms.

Even fully opened, the flowers are smaller than a ping-pong ball, yet they have a depth and symmetry that’s enhanced by the color variations throughout the blooms — providing endless fascination for macro photographers (like me!). During post-processing, I used Lightroom’s Texture Control (see Before and After: Yellow and Green (and Lightroom Radial Filters)) to enhance each foreground and soften each background, along with reducing highlights and adding contrast within the blooms using the Dehaze Tool. These three adjustments together help shift focus from the additional background elements that got included by using narrower apertures, to the intensified detail in the flowers and their blooms.

Here are links to the first gallery in this series, as well as a gallery of one of my other lantana plants:

Chapel Hill Yellow Lantana: Gallery 1 of 4

Wordless Wednesday: Chapel Hill Pink Huff Lantana

Thanks for taking a look!