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

Found Flowers (Set 2 of 3): Luscious Lantana

Hello! The gallery below contains lantana photos, the second of three galleries of reprocessed images from my archives.

The first set in this series is here: Found Flowers (Set 1 of 3): Marvelous Mandevilla.

Here are links to earlier posts containing some of the other “found photos” I recently reprocessed:

Wordless Wednesday: Five Found Flower Photos
Before and After: Tiny Bubbles
Wordless Wednesday: Hibiscus, Hibiscus, Bug

Thanks for taking a look!

Before and After: Tiny Bubbles

Every now and then I like to prowl around in my photo archives to see if there are some images I’ve forgotten about that capture my imagination, freshly. The photos I posted on Wordless Wednesday last week (Wordless Wednesday: Five Found Flower Photos) came from one of those prowling expeditions, when I discovered a folder containing about 200 photos that — despite all the photo rework I had done for my Flickr Reboot project — I had overlooked. They were all taken nearly a decade ago, one fine spring day, when many of the flowers were in bloom, and include bee balm, butterfly bushes, coneflowers, hibiscus, lantana, and mandevilla. I’m working through them all now, and will upload a few galleries throughout the week, but I finished this set of lantana blossoms that all had tiny bubbles in common, and decided to post them now.

I think these are photos of Mozelle Lantana — though I’m not entirely sure. I’ve grown many lantana varieties, some perennial, some annual, and some that were technically annual but came back for a couple of years anyway. If I could tell from the photos where on my property they were taken, I’d know for sure; but, as you can see, there is no defining background detail so I’m guessing the plant’s name based on the variety of colors in the blooms. I had just watered the garden, and when I noticed how the water droplets attached to the flowers as little glassy bubbles, I abandoned my gardening chores and brought out the camera instead.

The first gallery shows the final versions of these eleven images, after processing them through Adobe Lightroom and the Nik Collection. Select any image to see larger versions; and if you would like to read more about how the photos were processed, scroll down.

The second gallery shows the before-and-after versions of the eleven images above. I like to write these before-and-after posts (which are now assigned to their own category on this site) to help me think about what I’m doing with image processing and give me practice explaining it. One of the key things I’ve learned from all this practice, though, is this: subtle changes can improve a photo as much as drastic ones, but the cumulative effect of a set of subtle changes can be pretty dramatic.

Cropping and straightening are the first two things I do to every image in a set I’m working on, to set the images to 16×9 aspect ratio if I didn’t take them that way in the camera. Once that’s done, I use Lightroom’s automatic tone adjustments, letting Lightroom adjust exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, and blacks. I then apply the same level of sharpening and noise reduction to every photo.

These initial adjustments establish a starting point for the rest of my workflow in Lightroom and the Nik Collection. After completing them, I refine Lightroom’s automatic adjustments, typically reducing exposure slightly if it looks like Lightroom has over-exposed the images. With these photos, I also darkened both shadow levels and blacks, which emphasized color in the flowers without adding saturation or luminance.

Since it was High Pollen Season in Atlanta when I took these photos, the before images show a yellow cast from the pollen dust as well as artifacts that collected on the camera lens and the flowers — which present as dark dashes (if on the lens), black spots (if in the shadows) or white spots (tiny-bright “light catchers” from the sun). I removed some of the yellow color cast by adjusting white balance to a cooler (more blue) setting, then used spot removal to clean up the artifacts and dust. As a final step in Lightroom, I adjusted the sharpening mask, which has the effect of applying more sharpening to the image foreground and less to the background, reducing the appearance of background noise. In Lightroom, you can press the right-slash (/) key to compare the before and after versions of any photo you’re working on, so I used that to perform a quick visual check on each one, to make sure I hadn’t strayed too far from the original image with my adjustments. Then I selected each image for processing with Nik Collection’s Color Efex Pro.

From all my practice with Color Efex Pro, I’ve settled on a handful of filters that I apply to photos when I’m trying to enhance realism but not necessarily add creative effects. To make the process more efficient, I have a recipe set up in Color Efex Pro to apply the effects to each photo simultaneously, then work through them to adjust settings on individual photos:

  • White Neutralizer, which brightens whites without altering any of the other colors.
  • Brilliance/Warmth, which increases saturation and has a setting called “perceptual saturation” that enhances the three-dimensional or depth-perception character of the image.
  • Tonal Contrast, which I use to soften backgrounds if I want to further reduce background detail beyond Lightroom adjustments; or Pro Contrast, if I want contrast adjustments but want to retain background detail.
  • Darken/Lighten Center, which I use to shift visual focus to a specific area of the image and create additional background shadowing.
  • Remove Color Cast, to remove any color cast that has been created by the other adjustments — which, for these photos, consisted of ridding the photos of too much yellow or green shading.

That’s it! Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Lantana Bonanza! The Sequel

This is true: I often buy plants for my garden based on how I think theyโ€™ll look in photographs.

When I saw these Landmark Citrus Lantana at a nearby garden center and knew I had a couple of open medium-sized pots on my back-yard steps, I snapped them up and gave them a good home. I figured their flowers would start opening within a few days โ€“ given that the steps get plenty of sunlight during the day โ€“ and they didnโ€™t disappoint. The overall shape of the flower is very similar to the Chapel Hill Yellow Lantana, of course, but in addition to variations of yellow and orange colors, these flowers also show purple and magenta in the emerging and center buds, surrounded by yellow and orange petals as the flowers open.

I followed a similar process for selecting images for this post, choosing these sixteen from about 80 that I took and reviewed for adequate exposure and focus. On most of the photos, I used several Lightroom graduated filters โ€“ tools that are now among my favorites to apply during closeup and macro work. In those photos showing a single flower bud, for example, I created separate graduated filters from all four sides of the photo through to the center, adjusting exposure and reducing clarity on each of the four filters to dim and soften the background.

I then emphasized the flowers as focal points by increasing overall exposure slightly, adding a touch of light, and increasing saturation and luminance for purple, magenta, and orange to pop those colors. For some of the photos that show wide-open buds in bright yellow, I dropped yellow saturation a bit, as the yellow caught a lot of light and looked a little harsh and over-exposed with raggedy edges. The light was pretty good when I took these shots โ€“ which helped with depth-of-field and focus โ€“ but I did apply additional sharpening to give some of the flowers a bit of extra punch. As a final step before exporting the images from Lightroom, I removed a few spots where pollen on the leaves caught a sharp jab of sunlight, though there wasnโ€™t much of that kind of spot removal to do since recent rains left the leaves sparkly clean.

Before uploading the images, I always rename them with sequence numbers at the beginning of the names (like 01-DSC04636.jpg, 02-DSC04549.jpg, etc.) so that theyโ€™re names represent the order I want them to appear in the blog post or slideshow. That way I can preview the slideshow before uploading โ€“ using Adobe Bridge or another photo viewer โ€“ simply by having the viewer display the images in file name order. This always saves me some time when creating a media gallery for the blog post, since Iโ€™ve already decided on a sequence for the slideshow images and I can easily add the images to the gallery by file name.

This slideshow is loosely arranged by similarity, and you can select any of the photos below to begin viewing larger versions. My previous lantana slideshow is here: Lantana Bonanza!

Thanks for taking a look!

Lantana Bonanza!

Earlier this spring, I added some Chapel Hill Yellow Lantana to a large pot in the center of my courtyard garden. It didn’t grow much at first, but as the daily rains we were getting in Georgia subsided, the plants started getting more sun and the blooms are now popping. My garden is mostly a shade garden with lots of ferns and hostas — in the ground and in pots — but I’ve learned over the years how to take advantage of those areas where the sun does get through for a few hours each day. I’ve experimented quite a bit with flowering plants like lantana, some sun-loving vines (and even a couple of grapevines) that may not flower but grow well anyway, hydrangeas placed to catch early morning or late day sun, and a mix of sun annuals that make it through the summer pretty well.

The Chapel Hill Yellow Lantana, I learned, is a cross between Miss Huff and New Gold lantana varieties, all popular in southern gardens for their hardiness and persistent flowering throughout late summer and even into autumn. The floral symmetry of lantana flowers fascinates me; I learned that this type of flower shape is called an umbel — evocative of umbrella given that it’s overall shape is supported from a single point by “umbrella like” ribs. As the flowers first emerge, they look to me like tiny pillows arranged in concentric circles, changing from pale to brighter yellow as they grow, then developing into a rich yellow with a dark orange center. Using a macro lens and some cropping, I’ve tried to show that transition in the images below, as there were suddenly plenty of flowers at different stages of growth to show the early buds, mixtures of buds and emerging flowers, and some clusters that were fully in bloom.

Select any of the pictures below to see larger sizes in a slideshow … and thanks for reading and taking a look!