Lilies on Black Backgrounds (3 of 10)

From Through the Garden Gate by Elizabeth Lawrence:

“Someone left an orange daylily in our mail box….”

From Lilies for English Gardens by Gertrude Jekyll:

“Though introduced from China not much more than a hundred years ago, the Tiger Lily is among those that we cherish as old English garden flowers, so familiar is it, not only in our gardens, but in old pictures and in the samplers and embroideries of our great-grandmothers….

“[The] Tiger is the latest flowering of our Lilies, being in full bloom in September. Its bold, turn-cap form is so well known that it can want no description, except to draw attention to its remarkable colour, a soft salmon-orange, that can be matched by but few other flowers…. The black spots and dark stems and deep-brown, rust-coloured anthers combine to make a grand garden flower. “

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Hello!

Continuing my “Lilies on Black Backgrounds” project, here are some new galleries featuring deep-orange daylilies and a batch of tiger lilies.

For a description of the project, see the first post in this series: Lilies on Black Backgrounds: A Photo Project (1 of 10). The second post in the series is Lilies on Black Backgrounds (2 of 10). Click here (or scroll down) if you would like to see before-and-after versions of three of the tiger lilies.

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Here are before-and-after versions of three of the tiger lilies.

Some of the magic tricks I described in my first post for this series — Lilies on Black Backgrounds: A Photo Project (1 of 10) — worked especially well with these images. As you can see from the before versions below, the backgrounds contained a lot of extra “information” that I covered with my black brush. Despite the intricate structure of these flowers — including the tiny anthers (you know, like antlers, but for flowers) — the increased depth of field I got with a higher ISO and narrower apertures (f/22 or f/27, for example) made it (relatively) easy to remove the backgrounds while keeping the details intact.

Select the first image if you would like to compare the before and after versions in a slideshow.

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Thanks for taking a look!